This year's exhibition aims to examine the relationship between architecture and colonisation as parallel, interconnected systems. The Great Rift Valley – a geological formation that runs from southern Turkey through Palestine, the Red Sea to Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique – provides the exhibition’s geographical, geological and conceptual focus.
The exhibition, GBR – Geology Of Britannic Repair, is a unique UK-Kenya collaboration between a multi-disciplinary team of curators: Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau; UK-based curator and writer Owen Hopkins and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff.
Making a case for architecture as an earth practice, the curators and their collaborators hope that the exhibition will help to dismantle the prevalent and often unquestioned concept of architecture and rebuild it as a non-extractive practice geared towards repair, restitution and renewal.
‘GBR – Geology Of Britannic Repair aims to re-centre architecture’s fundamental relationship to geology, shifting how we see its past and present and re-orienting its future otherwise. With the Great Rift Valley as the exhibition’s geological and conceptual focus, we have brought together a series of installations that propose ‘other architectures’ defined by their relationship to the ground, their resistance to conventional, extractive ways of working, and that are resilient in the face of climate breakdown and social and political upheaval. Turning the British Pavilion inside out, we hope the exhibition will become a vital site for reimagining the relationship between architecture and the earth.’
Curatorial Team
Emerging from the 'rift', the exhibition is made up of a series of installations by Cave_bureau, Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenson, and the Palestine Regeneration Team / PART (Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser).
GBR – Geology Of Britannic Repair will reimagine what architecture has always uniquely been able to do: to try to materialise, visualise and aestheticise these vast processes and histories that stem from or contribute to colonialism and climate change into something that is meaningful, tangible and relatable.
The exhibition runs from 10 May to 23 November 2025.
Visual identity: TEMPLO
