Curated by a UK-Kenya team, the exhibition will examine the impact of material extraction and consider approaches to architectural repair
The British Council has announced further details of the British Pavilion for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia in 2025.
According to the British Council, the exhibition, titled GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, “investigates how architecture can reverse the destructive impacts of colonial systems of geological extraction through emergent practices of architectural repair.”
The exhibition is a collaboration between a multidisciplinary team of curators, including 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 Great Rift Valley – a geological formation extending from southern Turkey through Palestine, the Red Sea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Mozambique – provides the exhibition’s conceptual and geographical framework.
The exhibition will feature a series of architectural installations by Cave_bureau, Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil, Thandi Loewenson, and the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), comprising Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari, and Murray Fraser. According to the curators, the installations “reflect on architecture’s role in the geological afterlives of colonialism” and seek to “offer possibilities for planetary repair, restitution and renewal.”
The curators said the exhibition “aims to re-centre architecture’s fundamental relationship to geology” and will question “extractive ways of working” while exploring architectural responses to “climate breakdown and social and political upheaval.”
Sevra Davis, director of architecture, design and fashion at the British Council and commissioner of the British Pavilion, said the exhibition “will present a compelling and creative vision for the future of architecture” shaped by collaboration between the UK and Kenya. She added that it would “promote and protect plurality of cultural expression and dialogue.”
The British Council has commissioned the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 1937 and has used an open call process to select curators since 2012. It described the 2025 exhibition as part of its UK-Kenya Season, “a year of collaboration between the UK and Kenya which celebrates the connections between the two countries.”
The exhibition will run from 10 May to 23 November 2025, with a pre-opening on 8 and 9 May.
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