Venice Biennale curators in AnOther Magazine
The curatorial team behind the soon-to-open British Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture talk about how reading bell hooks has been central to their research.
“A big part of our work over the past six months has been reading people who are thinking about space in an expansive and poignant way. In Art on My Mind, bell hooks refers to imagining as a political act, as a form of resistance against social inequalities - it's been key to our curatorial research for the British Pavilion. It's a beautiful text in it she casts her mind back to an assignment she completed at school to envision a dream house and muses on how the task encouraged her to think imaginatively about space, prioritising what we desire and dream of over what is practical and within our economic means. As a young Black woman from a working-class family, hooks was writing this assignment without material wealth, so it was revolutionary. She proposes that imagination is the site for unrestrained, joyful space-making, which prompts the question, What if we all had the opportunity to think creatively about space in this unconstrained way? What would our built environment look like?" Taking the reins of the British Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture, Jayden Ali, Meneesha Kellay, Sumitra Upham and Joseph Zeal-Henry are seizing the opportunity to foreground the voices and imaginations of those they feel have been left outside the architecture canon.
The curators, who are second- or third-generation diasporic people living and working in Britain, are all friends and have brought together a range of skills and experiences, from curating exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Kellay) to spearheading cultural projects for the Greater London Authority (Zeal-Henry). More than anything, they hope to present a shared vision of disruptive discussions about urban planning and the future of our man-made surroundings. Their agenda is to champion spatial practices that ‘perhaps haven't been recognised or have been erased.’”
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Words: Jason Okundaye
Photography: Annie Lai
Styling: Molly Shillingford