PREVIEW

The British Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale explores the colonial legacy of the British Empire.

Titled GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, the exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between UK and Kenyan curators and artists.

The exhibition opens outside the Pavilion, where its neoclassical façade is partially obscured by Double Vision – a beaded veil of Kenyan agricultural waste briquettes, clay and Indian glass beads. The veil evokes histories of extraction and exchange, with the Murano-style glass beads recalling colonial trade and the Maasai-influenced clay beads signifying indigenous craftsmanship. The installation casts the building in earthy hues, symbolic of ‘other earths’ displaced by imperial systems.

Inside, six gallery spaces guide visitors through a complex landscape of memory, resistance and repair.

In a joint statement, the curators said: “This exhibition is a collaboration between the UK and Kenya, countries whose shared history has often been defined by violence and inequality. Our work is an intervention – an attempt to forge reparative relationships and new narratives about who gets to imagine and represent the world in a time of planetary crisis.”

The first gallery features The Earth Compass, a multi-sensory installation linking the skies above London and Nairobi on 12 December 1963 – the date of Kenya’s independence. The work is framed by maps of national carbon emissions, inviting reflection on empire’s environmental legacy and potential paths towards restitution.

In the second gallery, The Rift Room examines the Rift Valley’s dual identity as a site of ancient migration and modern conflict. At its centre is a bronze cast of a Kenyan cave, locally known as the “baboon parliament”. Here, the building’s brickwork is partially dismantled and replaced with Kenyan and British bricks, an act dubbed “Insurgent Geology” and intended to prompt discussions around resistance, material memory and global reimagination.

The exhibition brings together installations by the curators and commissions from international contributors including Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenson, and the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART).

PART’s installation Objects of Repair occupies the third gallery. Drawing from their long-running ‘Atlas of Materials’ project, the work investigates fractured geologies in Palestine and the creative reuse of salvaged materials in reconstructing communities affected by conflict and scarcity.

In the fourth space, a large rattan structure developed by Cave_bureau with Professor Phil Ayres recalls the Shimoni Slave Caves on Kenya’s coast. A full-scale interior reconstruction of one of the caves forms a space of both historical reckoning and restorative possibility, highlighting buried traumas and forgotten resistance.

Thandi Loewenson’s Lumumba’s Grave installation follows, exploring so-called “technofossils” – human-made space debris orbiting Earth. Through graphite drawings and models of African space projects, Loewenson critiques the colonial undertones of space exploration, instead reimagining it as a realm of liberation and futurism.

The exhibition concludes with Vena Cava, by Ghanaian-Filipino designer Mae-ling Lokko and Argentinean architect Gustavo Crembil. Taking inspiration from Kew Gardens’ Palm House, a former symbol of imperial botanical control, the empty timber structure features innovative materials such as bioplastics and fungi.

The commission is a central part of the British Council’s UK/Kenya Season 2025, a cultural initiative celebrating the historic and contemporary ties between the two nations.

Sevra Davis, Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council and Commissioner of the British Pavilion, commented: “The British Pavilion is a cornerstone of the British Council’s international cultural mission. This year’s UK-Kenya collaboration brings forward a new dimension, reflecting on how architecture can become a medium of repair and reconnection with the planet.”

The British Council has confirmed The Dalmore and 10N Collective as official supporting partners of the 2025 British Pavilion, underlining a shared commitment to creativity, innovation, and cultural exchange.