Raise the Roof: Building for Change is a unique opportunity to explore the stories embedded within the architecture of RIBA’s headquarters through a creative and inclusive lens. The design of 66 Portland Place has a multifaceted history, with motifs and materials throughout its interior decoration that reveal the Institute’s unexplored links with the British Empire. This exhibition seeks to confront some of the uncomfortable truths woven into the fabric of this building by creating a progressive dialogue between the past and present.
In this exhibition, a variety of new artistic interventions interrogate and respond to the complex narratives within specific interior features of 66 Portland Place – the Jarvis Mural and Florence Hall Dominion Screen. The commissions include:
Esi Eshun’s multidisciplinary response integrates sound and the overlay of archival imagery to tell the narratives behind specific features within the Jarvis Mural.
Thandi Loewenson’s piece Blacklight unearths stories of extraction, exploitation and racialisation, themes that underlie the visible layers of the Jarvis Mural and the world they supported to build.
Architectural designer Arinjoy Sen’s response to the Jarvis Mural, The Carnival of Portland Place, draws on the theatrical nature of the existing screen to reveal the inner mechanisms not only of the screen itself, but also the colonial traces that the mural references.
Giles Tettey Nartey’s unique piece of furniture Assembly directly responds to the Florence Hall Dominion Screen. His work invites visitors to think more broadly about the motifs used to describe and represent culture and architecture.
Join curator Margaret Cubbage for an exclusive and in-depth exploration of the exhibition.
