ARCANUM SANGUINIS: Occult Blood

2024-2025

Arcanum Sanguinis: Occult Blood was the 2024 season exhibition at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, bringing together provocative historical artefacts and symbolic objects in dialogue with Hunter’s laboratory-based biological artworks and works by contemporary artists including Genesis B. P-Orridge and Simon Costin. Open to the public from April 4 to November 1, 2024 (with the installation continuing into 2025 for private viewings), the exhibition marked the culmination of archival and artistic research conducted onsite in 2022 and 2024.

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The exhibition wove together a visual and conceptual framework tracing intersections between folk magic, alchemy, and their contemporary inheritor—biotechnology. Through a feminist and queer lens, it examined how the gendered persecution of witches and the medicalized treatment of bodies have long been entangled, extending beyond women to include all those positioned outside normative social structures.

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Exploring the body as a site of cultural production, the exhibition showcased how certain bodies have historically been cast as materia magica—their fluids and functions subjected to taboo and surveillance, yet central to systems of meaning. These tensions were made materially and affectively present through the interplay of artworks and archival objects.

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The exhibition also included the video performance/textile work Palimpsest, presented within the upstairs gallery, and an active Homuncularium Basiliscus performance-installation, further extending the exhibition into live and durational forms (see Performance & Ritual for related works).

The project was supported by a Friends of the Museum artist bursary (2022), with full exhibition development funded by the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic. A limited-edition guidebook, based on my archival research, accompanied the exhibition; printed in an edition of five and hand-bound by Fergus Moffat, it is also available as a downloadable PDF through the Museum.