Do you find your average museum too conservative, too elitist, too focused on a narrow-minded, pedantic notion of 'knowledge'? Then the Viktor Wynd Museum is the place for you!
The World In A Hackney Basement
'The Museum has no overreaching aim beyond the theft of it's vistors' time', the Viktor Wynd Museum declares in its mission statement. 'To show the world not in a grain of sand, but in a Hackney Basement.'
Whether or not they have succeeded in showing us the world, they have certainly shown us something.
Victor Wynd's Little Shop of Horrors
Shrunken heads, two-headed kittens, nails from a crucifixion, celebrity faeces, the skeleton of a giant anteater, dildos, mermaids, pickled prostitute parts, artworks of the insane, condoms used by the Rolling Stones and Happy Meal toys, these are just some of the things you can find on display there.
Why?
Not in service of any grand system, nor to enlighten us with scientific truth, the Viktor Wynd Museum's only aim is to show us those parts of the world that more conventional collections hide from view.
Its curator views the careful ordering of ordinary museum collections as pedantic, and maybe even arrogant. Viktor Wynd's wild and imaginative collection forces us to question whether such ruthless categorization of what is and what is not worth seeing can do anything but limit the lens through which we view the world.
The 'Wunderkabinett' Reborn
His ideas here are not novel, but steeped in tradition.
Pre-enlightenment, museums were not seen as places of institutionalized education, but as 'Wunderkabinett's- places stuffed so full of the world's curiosities as to render their collections beyond categorization. Places you would go not to learn, but to be blown away.
The Last Tuesday Society
The group that run the Viktor Wynd Museum are almost as eccentric as their collection. They 're known as 'The Last Tuesday Society' and have built up a reputation for putting on seances, going on expeditions to Papua New Guinea and throwing some of history's strangest parties.
In 2007, they hosted 'Loss- An Evening of Exquisite Misery'. This event involved people dressing up in decaying beauty and peeling onions to a soundtrack of some of the saddest songs of the last 300 years.
Sounds delightful.
Absinthe At The Viktor Wynd Museum
Perhaps more inviting, the Last Tuesday Society also run a cocktail bar and traditional absinthe parlour, next to the Viktor Wynd Museum, for anyone who's seen enough shrunken heads for one lifetime.
The Viktor Wynd Museum: come for the celebrity faeces, stay for the super strength green liquor!
One More Thing...
Viktor Wynd himself once put on an exhibition in Miami that featured various images of him committing suicide. He called it: 'Sorrows of Young Wynd'.
Interested in finding more places like this? Try one of our Treasure Trails in London - untangle cryptic clues as a team, as you are taken on a journey to the most unique, unusual and bizarre corners of London.
