The 2025 British Pavilion in Venice offered up a Geology of Britannic Repair

There's a positional arrogance to the British Pavilion, placed as it is to terminate the grand axis of the Giardini, flanked by France and Germany on either side but raised up above both. Dating from 1909, just before the extent and scale of the British empire reached its peak, the building was designed by the architect Edwin Alfred Rickards. With its grand cascade of steps, classical columns and the bearing of a temple, not a gallery space, it is a prime example of how culture projects soft power.

Enter the 2025 British Pavilion in Venice: 'GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair'

Inside, apart from the main space, things are a little different. A tight, awkward procession of smallish rooms, with high ceilings, the pavilion is a throwback to an earlier age, a world of rigour and hierarchy. Unsurprisingly, this small but significant symbol of an evaporated empire frequently serves as a backdrop for exhibitions questioning and challenging the long-term legacy of the country that built it. And so it proves at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, with the installation GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair.

This year’s curatorial team, Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi of Nairobi-based architecture studio Cave_bureau, and UK-based writer Owen Hopkins and academic Professor Kathryn Yusoff, are not the first to react against the structure and its inherent symbolism. At the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, a curatorial team responding to the festival assembled by Lesley Lokko created a celebration of the new spaces of multiculturalism, Dancing Before The Moon. GBR goes further, literally digging into the fabric of the structure to represent past and present challenges to colonialism.

This physicality starts with the exterior and a piece called Double Vision, consisting of a beaded veil that shrouds the structure and obscures its overt classical symmetry through a new texture formed from red glass beads and spheres made from clay and agricultural waste. The exhibition is part of a wider British Council project, the UK/Kenya Season 2025, forming a waypoint between London and Nairobi, with a ‘geographical, geological and conceptual focus’ on the Rift Valley.

The central installation, Earth Compass, this connection is made explicit, reproducing the stars in the sky on the night of 12 December 1963, the date of Kenya’s independence. Paths subsequently diverged but cultural ties remained, with the post- empire realities for each country illustrated via a representation of national cumulative carbon emissions.

This is followed by the Rift Room, an installation centring around a bronze cast of a Kenyan cave system frequented by baboons, whilst the pavilion walls are peeled back to brick to allow the insertion of Kenyan and British bricks into the original structure. The room was created in collaboration with e-flux Architecture.

Objects of Repair comes next, a project by Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari and Murray Fraser of the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART). An exploration of the changed and blasted landscape of Palestine, forever tortured by its twentieth century role as a colonial bargaining chip, part of this piece is practical, imagining how the scars of war and destruction could be repurposed as practical building materials. An animation tumbles through a three-dimensional world of shattered concrete, conjuring beauty and reflection out of past and ongoing horrors, layer upon layer of them.

The installation that follows, formed from rattan weave, also ekes beauty out of a historic terror that continues to reach into the present. A collaboration between Nairobi-based practice Cave_bureau and Professor Phil Ayres at the Royal Danish Academy, the structure is a 1:1 recreation of part of the Shimoni Slave Cave in Kenya. This natural cave system was once used to hold enslaved Africans ahead of their transportation. Although there was an arduous and terrifying underground escape route to another complex, the Three Giant Sister Caves, these jagged, angular forms, pierced by patterns of light, are intended to ‘reimagine a space of trauma as a space for repair and healing.’

Dr Thandi Loewenson’s Lumumba’s Grave is a celebration of the dream of the African space programme, paired with imagined remnants of satellites as ‘technofossils’ and in the final gallery is the installation Vena Cava.

Taking the geometry of Decimus Burton’s Palm House at Kew, a vessel and symbol of the physical transplantation of the tropics, the Ghanaian-Filipino designer Mae-ling Lokko and Argentinean architectural designer Gustavo Crembil have created Vena Cava, an empty timber structure filled with panels of new material possibilities. These include fly ash, bioplastics, and fungi, a world away from the industrialisation of mineral extraction and exploitation that is one characteristic of colonialism.

As in 2023, the British Pavilion was awarded a Special Mention by the jury of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. The exhibition was supported in part by The Dalmore Scotch Whisky, who also sponsored the British Council’s opening night party at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.

The British Council commission GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair is at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 until Sunday 23 November 2025, VeniceBiennale.BritishCouncil.org, LaBiennale.org