LONDON, ENGLAND.-The British Museum presents Living and Dying: The Wellcome Trust Gallery. The next stage in the return of the Museum's magnificent ethnographic collections, this new permanent gallery compares the strategies employed by western and non-western cultures in coping with life's everyday challenges and misfortunes and maintaining a sense of health and wellbeing. Star objects include the Easter Island Statue, gold masterpieces from ancient Peru and Bolivia, an art installation made up of all the pills and medicines a person in the developed world consumes in a lifetime and the Apocalypse horsemen from the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, wrote: "The Wellcome Trust Gallery is a stimulating new venue offering a fresh perspective on the collections of the British Museum. It will house a series of long term exhibitions each with a focus on life's challenges as they affect all of us - from whatever cultural background we come. Living and dying is the first of these. It looks at how people around the world deal with the tough realities of life, averting or confronting trouble, sorrow, need and sickness. What we find is not an unremittingly solemn response, still less a single strategy for dealing with such realities. The understanding of causes and symptoms, the ways we find of coping, and the objects we make in the process, are creative and inspiring.

The theme is universal, it can be traced in one degree or another in all the galleries of the British Museum. For the Wellcome Trust Gallery is not just about particular cultures: in a sense it throws light on the Museum's collections as a whole. In looking at and beyond objects as a means of comprehending common human experience we enlarge our experience of the world, opening a window on what life is and was like for people in widely different places and times. We can also, thereby, see our own assumptions and practices afresh."