The Absinthe Parlour

Welcome to The Absinthe Parlour at The Last Tuesday Society - a drinker’s cabinet of wonder filled with unusual spirits, from the old world and new, together in one curious exhibition of extraordinary elixirs. Seek and you shall find: hidden here are explorations of alchemy & magick, pleasure & fantasy, celebrating the point at which curiosity unlocks a world unknown.The Last Tuesday Society presents The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & UnNatural History - an incoherent vision of the world displayed through wonder enclosed within a tiny space, no attempt is made at classification and comprehensiveness, instead the museum focuses on the pre-enlightenment origins of the museum as Wunderkabinett – a mirror to a world so suffused with miracles and beauty that any attempt at categorization is bound to fail. Where contemporary museumology hides 90% of a collection, attempts to educate and explain, to put the world into neat little labeled drawers dictated by an obscurantist elite establishment that has shown itself in error many time over the centuries & is obsessed with a pedantic overspecialization of so called “knowledge” that means little or nothing to anyone outside it’s narrow little field & oft discredited metanarratives this museum displays everything that has glittered & caught the eye of it’s founder – from rare priceless marvels of the natural and scientific worlds like Dodo Bones or speculum to the intriguing beauty of McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys, from old master etchings to prison inmates & mad women’s doodles, occultists paintings and pop art prints, the horrors and wonders of nature, two headed kittens and living coral. By placing the rare and the beautiful on the same plane as the commonplace, banal & amusing this museum seeks not to educate but to subvert, to show the world not in a grain of sand, but in a Hackney basement. The Museum has no overreaching aim beyond the theft of it’s visitors time and the hope that it will provide amusement by return & hopes to fill the vacuum between what the establishment elite believes is worthy of worship & what exists in the world.