The exhibition, titled GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, is a collaboration between a multi-disciplinary team of curators – Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau; and UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff. The commission is a core part of the British Council’s UK/Kenya Season 2025, which celebrates the creative, cultural and educational links between the countries of the UK and Kenya.
The exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus is the Rift Valley, a geological formation that runs from southeastern Africa through Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia, along the Red Sea, through Jordan, Palestine, Israel and Lebanon to southern Turkey.
The exhibition comprises installations developed by the curatorial team as well as installations they have commissioned from a range of other practitioners from around the world, including Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenson, and the Palestine Regeneration Team / PART (Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser).
The exhibition begins on the Pavilion’s façade, which is partially obscured by a beaded veil of agricultural waste briquettes and clay and glass beads. Produced in Kenya and India respectively, the clay beads echo traditional Maasai practices, while the glass beads recall those made on the Venetian island of Murano, which were historically used as imperial currency for exchange of metals, minerals and enslaved persons. Titled Double Vision, the veil casts the pavilion’s neo-classical facade in hues of black, brown and red, evoking the ‘other earths’ that have been displaced by systems of empire.
Inside the Pavilion, the exhibition unfolds throughout six gallery spaces. In the first gallery, an immersive and multi-sensory installation, The Earth Compass, connects London and Nairobi through celestial maps of the night sky above both cities on 12 December 1963, the day of Kenya’s independence from British control. Framed by a cartography of the national cumulative carbon emissions on the surrounding walls, The Earth Compass reflects on the projections and realities constructed by empire and asks us to consider the reparative possibilities of alternative modes of world-building.
In the second gallery – the Rift Room – the installation emerges literally and figuratively from the Great Rift Valley, a geological formation stretching from the Middle East through East Africa which traces one of humankind’s earliest migration routes and which remains a site of negotiation and frequent conflict between those who departed and those who stayed behind. Entering the room, visitors congregate around a large-scale, bronze cast of a Kenyan Rift Valley cave – a site known locally as the ‘baboon parliament.’ Around the model, the gallery’s underlying brick structure is revealed to enable the insertion of Kenyan and British bricks into the pavilion’s structure. This act of ‘Insurgent Geology’ serves also as a conduit to a series of conversations, curated in collaboration with e-flux Architecture, exploring stories of colonial resistance, material reclamation and planetary reimagination.
The third room in the Pavilion houses a project by Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser of the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), emerging from their ongoing initiative ‘Atlas of Materials’ (2010–present), which explores using salvaged materials and innovative techniques for reconstruction and regeneration in Gaza and other areas, addressing scarcity and climate justice. Titled Objects of Repair, PART’s British Pavilion installation explores fracture and repair in the architectures and geologies of Palestine, looking to the potential of reusing salvaged materials in rebuilding what has been lost, to create new architectural skins that incorporate the scars of trauma. The work envisions an alternative potential reality – a world of impermanence, resilience and expression, born from architectures of accumulated, reparative changes.
In the fourth gallery, visitors encounter a dramatic, undulating, rattan weave structure – the result of a collaboration between Cave_bureau and Professor Phil Ayres at the Royal Danish Academy, developed following a research trip undertaken by Cave_bureau to the Kenyan coastal town of Shimoni in 2021. The town is the site of the Shimoni Slave Caves, a system of natural limestone caves which once served as holding cells for enslaved Africans before they were transported further afield. Once connected by a hidden corridor stretching several kilometres to the Three Giant Sister Caves, where escaped slaves sought refuge, much of the network has now been silted up and the past trauma of the site, though still intensely felt in the surrounding communities, has been erased on the surface. The British Pavilion installation, a 1:1 scale reproduction of the interior of one of the Shimoni Caves, reimagines a space of trauma as a space for repair and healing, uncovering forgotten histories from the accumulation of silt and sand.
An installation by architectural designer and researcher Thandi Loewenson, Lumumba’s Grave, explores so-called ‘technofossils’ – the remnants of man-made objects sent into space, amassed in orbit into an archaeology of imperialist expansion beyond the earth. A series of graphite drawings line the walls and ceiling, showing the scenes of exploitation and extraction that connect this extraterrestrial detritus to its earthly origins, while models of African space programme projects hang in the room, suspended in a celestial geology. In these objects, the violence of rocketry is overwritten with a story of liberation; workers, dreamers, rocket scientists, and combatants become the architects of our possible future.
In the final gallery of the Pavilion, Mae-ling Lokko, a Ghanaian-Filipino designer, academic and artist, and Gustavo Crembil, an Argentinean architectural designer, present Vena Cava, an installation that seeks to reclaim Kew Garden’s Palm House as a site for generative justice. The world’s first large-scale greenhouse allowed for tropical plants to be transplanted into temperate climes, becoming a symbol of the empire’s reach and aspiration for control. Vena Cava itself is empty, its timber structure inverting the Palm House’s pioneering iron and glass construction. Patterned panels of emerging material streams such as fly ash, bioplastics, and fungi illustrate a shift away from mechanical environmental regulation, and towards a reparative architecture that foregrounds considerations of material life cycles and ecological restitution.
The curators said:
"The exhibition is a collaboration between UK and Kenya, two countries that have had a difficult, unequal and often brutalised history. As curators, we see this collaboration as an intervention in building reparative relations, one that acknowledges the rifted histories of colonial afterlives, and the role of architecture in constructing new imaginaries. We hope visitors to the exhibition will question who gets to represent and imagine the world in a time of planetary fire."
Sevra Davis, Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council and Commissioner of the British Pavilion, said:
"The British Pavilion in Venice is a flagship initiative for the British Council, as part of our cultural relations mission to build connections, understanding and trust around the world. This year, the curatorial collaboration between the UK and Kenya brings a new dimension to the British Pavilion. GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair showcases new thinking about how architecture as we know it can be better connected to the earth and contribute to a future based on repair and renewal."
The British Council is delighted to have The Dalmore as an official supporting partner of the British Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2025, cementing their ongoing commitment to support exceptional design talent and creativity.
The British Council is also pleased to share that 10N Collective has joined as an official supporting partner of the 2025 British Pavilion, a partnership that reflects a shared commitment to creative thinking and innovation.
ENDS