The Last Tuesday Society, which hosts lectures on the unusual on more than just the last Tuesday of the month is fund raising for a museum of curiosities.
Officially it’s a shop, which rather remarkably was granted museum status by Hackney Council, so is dutifully turning the shop in the country’s only Curiosity Museum.
The Little Shop of Horrors hovers halfway between theatre and sculpture, shop and museum, academic institution and art gallery, it is, like its founder, both an installation and a performance.
The new museum is described as being a unique Wunderkabinett that will hope to offer a mirror to a world so suffused with miracles and beauty that any attempt at categorization is bound to fail.
If funding is raised, then the Upper Galleries will be dedicated to exhibitions, a coral reef aquarium, a minute gift shop & a tiny macabre baroque cocktail bar & cafe, underground The Wunderkabinett will host a gesumskunstwerk of Curiosities, Natural History & Fine Art, from old master etchings to tin toys & extinct birds
Seated on deep velvet banquettes, guests will dine off a sarcophagus holding a 19th century human skeleton, surrounded by erotica and overlooked by a caged lion skeleton and a disturbingly powerful Mervyn Peake painting.
They are nearly half way to their fund raising target of £10,000 and have a kickstarter page to collect the rest.