Musée The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History

“The Marvellous is Always Beautiful, Anything Marvellous is Beautiful, in Fact Only The Marvellous is Beautiful” - Andre Breton, Le Manifeste du Surrealisme


The Museum presents an incoherent vision of the world displayed through wonder, enclosed within a tiny space. No attempt is made at classification & comprehensiveness; instead The Museum focuses on the pre-enlightenment origins of the museum as Wunderkabinett – a mirror to a world so suffused with miracles & beauty that any attempt at categorization is bound to fail.

Where contemporary museumology hides 90% of a collection, attempts to educate & explain, to put the world into neat little labelled drawers dictated by an obscurantist elite establishment that has shown itself in error many times over the centuries & is obsessed with a pedantic overspecialization of so-called “knowledge” that means little or nothing to anyone outside its narrow little field & oft discredited metanarratives. This Museum merely displays everything that has glittered & caught the eye of its founder – from rare priceless marvels of the natural & 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, occultist’s paintings & pop art prints, the horrors & wonders of nature, two-headed kittens & living coral. By placing the rare & 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 & 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.

The Museum originally opened its doors in 2005 as a curiosity shop in the basement - Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors - & an Art Gallery on the ground floor called  Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc, becoming a Museum following a successful Kickstarter campaign.

The price of admission to the museum is £5.


The photographs on this audioguide were taken on location by our official photographer - Oskar Proctor.

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