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ABSTRACTIt is generally assumed that anthropological artefacts are fundamentally different from art works. This article questions aspects of this distinction by exploring the role of curators in anthropological collections, with a focus on the Africa Galleries at the British Museum. It looks at the complexities faced by the curators of a controversial collection, which is contested as ‘heritage’ and the curatorial practices used to address it in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It explores questions such as: can curatorial work narrate the Other outside power structures? How might it narrate other cultures? And can there be collaborations across cultures without collapsing into existing power structures?Johannes Fabian has argued that ethnography has two ‘moments’: the first involves close exchange and collaboration with other communities during field trips. The second involves the construction of an unchanging temporality through which another culture becomes Other and thus excluded from change. This exclusion applies a power relationship. The article demonstrates how the curators sought to develop exhibitions which critiqued the second moment and built on the first by collaborating with living artists. In so doing the curators also questioned the status of works in anthropological collections.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a severely painful and debilitating disease of the joint, which brings about degradation of the articular cartilage and currently has few therapeutic solutions. Two-dimensional (2D) high-throughput screening (HTS) assays have been widely used to identify candidate drugs with therapeutic potential for the treatment of OA. A number of small molecules which improve the chondrogenic differentiation of progenitor cells for tissue engineering applications have also been discovered in this way. However, due to the failure of these models to accurately represent the native joint environment, the efficacy of these drugs has been limited in vivo. Screening systems utilizing three-dimensional (3D) models, which more closely reflect the tissue and its complex cell and molecular interactions, have also been described. However, the vast majority of these systems fail to recapitulate the complex, zonal structure of articular cartilage and its unique cell population. This review summarizes current 2D HTS techniques and addresses the question of how to use existing 3D models of tissue-engineered cartilage to create 3D drug screening platforms with improved outcomes.Impact statementCurrently, the use of two-dimensional (2D) screening platforms in drug discovery is common practice. However, these systems often fail to predict efficacy in vivo, as they do not accurately represent the complexity of the native three-dimensional (3D) environment. This article describes existing 2D and 3D high-throughput systems used to identify small molecules for osteoarthritis treatment or in vitrochondrogenic differentiation, and suggests ways to improve the efficacy of these systems based on the most recent research.

AbstractThe most common form of restaging is that of the retrospective exhibition, for it can be used to provide a platform for the museum to reaffirm the original exhibition and in turn reaffirm itself as host. For Harald Szeemann, the role of the curator was that of a mediator who, through the exhibition, should attempt to halt the abovementioned closed-circuit of affirmations by questioning existing boundaries and canons. His own work, however, has been repeatedly restaged in recent years. This article focuses on two restagings: the Prada Foundation's When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013(2013) and the Getty Research Institute's Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions(2018). I argue that restaged exhibitions can take two different forms: they can be focused on revising traditional canons and hierarchies, or they can serve to reaffirm the exhibition and the hosting institution. The two forms are interdependent, however, and most restagings contain a mixture of the two.

AbstractOne of the difficulties facing art historians and curators when approaching recently produced artworks is how to interpret such works within the dominant narrative of art history and its traditional axis of historical time and geographical place. Often such works are interpreted as ‘global’ and effectively reduced to a western interpretation of the artworks. While this is a helpful approach for many artists and artworks, it can be less helpful to the interpretation of works that seek to address local issues that the ‘global’ approach might miss. Moreover, the criteria of the ‘global’ might exclude such works from being perceived as ‘contemporary art’. The problem today is acute when dealing with artworks in East Asia, especially China, because so many works have been accepted as ‘global’ only occasionally mentioning that they are ‘Chinese’. Hence the uneasy term ‘Contemporary Chinese art’ and the debate between its interpretation as ‘global’ and/or ‘Chinese’. If the latter perspective is applied, some form of ‘Chineseness’ will explicitly or implicitly be applied. This article takes the ‘local’ perspective in order to interpret a group of works by the Hong Kong/Macau artist Lo Yuen-yi in memory of the rural women who practised nüshu (women’s writing) through chants, embroidery and writing in Hunan province, China. In so doing, Lo can position herself within an alternative narrative of female literate and artistic ancestral narrative from which she is not excluded as a Chinese female artist. The article argues that the work cannot be fully understood from the ‘global’ perspective and thus requires a perspective that would necessarily adopt a strategic concept of ‘Chineseness’.

Spectral karyotyping and multiple fluorophore fluorescence in situ hybridisation (M-FISH) facilitate identification of inter-chromosomal rearrangements, but are of low cytogenetic resolution in mapping translocation breakpoints. Reverse chromosome painting yields increased cytogenetic information but isolation of aberrant chromosomes is technically difficult. We have developed the technique of paint-assisted microdissection FISH (PAM-FISH), which enables microdissection of aberrant chromosomes to be carried out easily and rapidly using relatively simple apparatus. A selected chromosome paint is hybridised to abnormal metaphases to label a chromosome of interest, which is then microdissected, amplified, labelled by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and reverse painted onto extended normal metaphases. PAM-FISH was used to reassess structural chromosomal abnormalities identified by molecular cytogenetics in the rhabdomyosarcoma cell line RD. PAM-FISH improved the analysis of virtually all structural abnormalities, identifying six novel translocations and indicating that seven previously described rearrangements were in fact not present in RD. Accuracy of the breakpoint mapping obtained was confirmed by bacterial artificial chromosome-FISH. PAM-FISH is ideally suited to analysis of tumour metaphases as it is not affected by poor chromosome morphology. Reagents generated by PAM-FISH are also suitable for other investigations, such as mapping using sequence tagged-site PCR or genomic microarrays. PAM-FISH is technically straightforward and could readily be adopted in a routine cytogenetics laboratory for accurate high-throughput analysis of chromosome breakpoints. © 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

This study reports the first fully synthetic fluid gel (SyMGels) using a simple poly(ethylene glycol) polymer. Fluid gels are an interesting class of materials: structured during gelation via shear‐confinement to form microparticulate suspensions, through a bottom‐up approach. Structuring in this way, when compared to first forming a gel and subsequently breaking it down, results in the formation of a particulate dispersion with particles “grown” in the shear flow. Resultantly, systems form a complex microstructure, where gelled particles concentrate remaining non‐gelled polymer within the continuous phase, creating an amorphous‐like interstitial phase. As such, these materials demonstrate mechanical characteristics typical of colloidal glasses, presenting solid‐like behaviors at rest with defined yielding; likely through intrinsic particle‐particle and particle‐polymer interactions. To date, fluid gels have been fabricated using polysaccharides with relatively complex chemistries, making further modifications challenging. SyMGels are easily functionalised, using simple click‐chemistry. This chemical flexibility, allows the creation of microenvironments with discrete biological decoration. Cellular control is demonstrated using MSC (mesenchymal stem cells)/chondrocytes and enables the regulation of key biomarkers such as aggrecan and SOX9. These potential therapeutic platforms demonstrate an important advancement in the biomaterial field, underpinning the mechanisms which drive their mechanical properties, and providing a versatile delivery system for advanced therapeutics. Novel synthetic‐based fluid gels (SyMGels) are developed and studied as a platform technology to create bespoke cellular microenvironments. Controlled gelation within a sheared environment promotes a complex microstructure, providing highly tuneable behaviors akin to soft glasses: engineering materials ideal for dynamic/articulated anatomical regions. The chemically “simple” polymers allow for ease of customization/functionalization, using biomolecules as decoration, to influence cell responses.