The British Pavilion, commissioned by The British Council, features the exhibition title GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair to represent the United Kingdom at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025. The exhibition is a 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. The Pavilion curators and commissioner have been awarded a Special Mention for National Participation by the jury in recognition of their exploration of the relationship between Great Britain and Kenya, focusing on themes of reparation and renewal.
The exhibition centers on the Rift Valley, a significant geological formation that stretches from southeastern Africa through Mozambique, Kenya, and Ethiopia, continuing along the Red Sea and extending through Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and into southern Turkey. Bringing together diverse perspectives, the exhibition features a series of installations developed by the curatorial team alongside commissioned works by practitioners from around the world. Contributors include Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenson, and the Palestine Regeneration Team, whose practices engage with themes relevant to the region's layered histories and contemporary conditions.
The exhibition opens on the Pavilion's façade, partially veiled by an installation composed of agricultural waste briquettes, clay, and glass beads. Sourced from Kenya and India, the clay beads reference traditional Maasai craftsmanship, while the glass beads evoke those historically produced on the Venetian island of Murano, once used as imperial currency in the exchange of metals, minerals, and enslaved individuals. Titled Double Vision, the veil overlays the Pavilion's neo-classical architecture in tones of black, brown, and red, alluding to "other earths" displaced through imperial systems.
Inside the Pavilion, the exhibition unfolds across six interconnected galleries, each addressing themes through distinct material and spatial languages. The first gallery features "The Earth Compass", an immersive installation linking the skies above London and Nairobi on the day of Kenya's independence, framed by global carbon emissions to question imperial legacies and envision alternative futures. The second space, "The Rift Room", centers on a bronze cast of a Rift Valley cave, known locally as the "baboon parliament", and incorporates Kenyan and British bricks into the Pavilion's structure, forming a site of material dialogue and curated discussions on colonial resistance. In the third gallery, the Palestine Regeneration Team's "Objects of Repair" explores reconstruction through salvaged materials in Gaza, proposing architectures shaped by fracture, memory, and resilience. The fourth gallery presents a full-scale rattan reproduction of "Kenya's Shimoni Caves" by Cave_bureau and Phil Ayres, reimagining a site of historical trauma as a place of healing. Thandi Loewenson's "Lumumba's Grave" in the fifth space, traces the imperial reach of space technologies through graphite drawings and suspended models that reclaim narratives of African agency in space exploration. Finally, on the sixth gallery, "Vena Cava" by Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil inverts the colonial legacy of the greenhouse to foreground regenerative materials and ecological justice, marking a shift toward reparative design practices.
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. - The curatorial team.
The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 will run from May 10 to November 23, hosting a total of 65 National Pavilions. Among them, four countries, Azerbaijan, Oman, Qatar, and Togo, will be participating for the first time. The Azerbaijan national pavilion will present Equilibrium. Patterns of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Togo will present the exhibition titled Considering Togo's Architectural Heritage. This year The Kingdom of Bahrain's national pavilion was awarded Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Titled Heatwave, the exhibition was curated by architect Andrea Faraguna and located in the historic Artiglierie of the Arsenale. And the British Pavilion received a Special Mention from the jury for their exploration of the relationship between Great Britain and Kenya, focusing on themes of reparation and renewal.
Editor's note: This article was originally published on April 4, 2024, and updated on May 16, 2025, to include photographs of the exhibit.
We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the 2025 Venice Biennale.
