STRIPPED of its skin, and with bone, muscle and tissue exposed, the cadaver seems to float in a form of suspended animation in its artistically lit glass case. There is the temptation to describe it as poetry in arrested motion, or something similarly lofty-sounding. But then you remember with a jolt that this museum exhibit was once a living, breathing, moving, sentient being.This is the intellectual dilemma facing visitors to Body Worlds Vital, an exhibition of plastinated human bodies and body parts showing at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown, Johannesburg.Viscerally, you might expect to be repulsed by the sight of real corpses — all voluntarily donated — whose tissue has been drained of fluid and replaced with a polymer-like silicon rubber. The bodies were then dissected and posed in sporting positions to illustrate the vitality of the body.But you might confound your instincts by being strangely drawn to these “grotesques” instead — perhaps because they are matte, plast...
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