Puzzle over who you really are at the Wellcome Collection's Identity exhibition

Issues of identity are under the microscope at the Wellcome Collection

If you’ve ever wondered about what seems to be a random face in a family photograph or felt that your own face doesn’t ‘fit’ then you’ll find something to fascinate you in the Wellcome Collection’s Identity exhibition.

Organised as a series of rooms rather like the different lobes of a person’s brain the exhibition is billed as ‘Eight Rooms Nine Lives’. Each room concentrates on a single individual with the exception of one devoted to the lives of identical twins Charlotte and Emily Hinch. But the exhibition could just as easily be called Eight Rooms 108 Lives, given the sheer variety of what a life can be.

The idea of multiple identities and personalities takes startling form in the rooms occupied by actress Fiona Shaw and photographer Claude Cahun. Watching Shaw inhabit a series of characters from T S Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an uncanny experience. She changes from one personality to another in a single breath or a turn of the head – transfixed by her presence I also felt as though I were trying to see through or round her, trying to work out where all the ‘others’ were coming from.

Born Lucie Schwob in fin-de-siècle France Claude Cahun emerged around 1914. Together with her lover Suzanne Malherbe (aka Marcel Moore) she created what could be called a series of anti-self portraits. Using masks and mirrors and photomontage Cahun imagines her identical twin and changes from blonde boy (see above) to Balkan peasant girl.

When the Nazis occupied Jersey, Cahun’s home from 1937 until her death in 1954, Cahun and Moore came up with yet another identity for the purpose of supporting the resistance. Their demoralised German “soldier without a name” wrote grumbling, disgruntled letters that Cahun and Moore distributed round the island.

For all Shaw and Cahun’s passion and showmanship the most emotional part of this exhibition relates to scientific explorations of identity. Perhaps this isn’t surprising – we’re fascinated by the idea that science could somehow pin down aspects of our identity yet rebellious at the constraints implied by such possibilities.

The star of the scientific show is Alec Jeffreys, discoverer of DNA fingerprinting and critic of Britain’s national DNA database, the largest per capita in the world. Jeffreys’ room seethes with the successes and controversies of DNA profiling, from the conviction of murderers to a blog written by British National Party leader Nick Griffin, incensed that a genetic study had linked a group of Yorkshire men to people in West Africa via similarities in their DNA.

Now I know Griffin is an identity obsessive par excellence – it’s one way of describing him – but most of us do attach symbolic importance to our identity and those of other people. One of Jeffreys’ more unusual projects involved taking DNA from Joseph Mengele’s bones to prove he really had died in Brazil in 1979. There’s a photo of Jeffreys smiling and holding a test tube sample of Mengele’s DNA – the torturer finally vanquished and reduced to a lab specimen.

8 Rooms 9 Lives runs until 6 April 2010. Entry is free.