V&A Blog

Plot twist: the Library comes to you!

Vicky Worsfold — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:54:45 +0000

Introducing our new Virtual Reading Room Service Access rare and unique collections without leaving your desk. We’re pleased to launch our new Virtual Reading Room (VRR) service, designed to bring the National Art Library to you – wherever you are in the world. Through a live Microsoft Teams appointment, a member of our Library staff will guide you through your requested materials using a high-resolution camera. You’ll be able to explore items in real time, asking staff to turn pages, pause, or zoom in on specific details that matter to your research or interests. It’s a flexible, interactive way to engage with our collections when an in-person visit isn’t possible. (We are,...

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Introducing the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Project

Dr Erika Lederman — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:00:13 +0000

The Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection at the V&A is one of the most significant collections of photography in the world. To unlock its inspiring potential, we are leading an ambitious project that will preserve...

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V&A East Storehouse shortlisted for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026

V&A — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:12:34 +0000

Art Fund, the national charity for museums and galleries, today announced the five museums selected as finalists for Art Fund Museum of the Year 2026, the world’s largest museum prize. Alongside V&A East Storehouse, the...

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Curtains Close on ‘Commercial Graphics of the 1930s’ Display

Ida Ebehiwalu — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:30:45 +0000

If you are passing through the museum this month, be sure to stop outside the National Art Library, as it will be your last chance to view the Commercial Graphics of the 1930s display. The...

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Towards a Civic Museum

Rubén Salgado Pérez — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

Some commissions begin with a site. Others begin with an artist. A few begin with a problem so large that no single object can contain it, and the only way to approach it is through a long process of conversation, testing, and trust.Towards a Civic Museum, the stained-glass commission by Tania Bruguera for V&A East, belongs to the latter. Installed at the threshold of the museum as it opens in East London, the work is not simply an artwork placed within a new building. It is a proposition addressed to an institution still becoming.

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Sounding a polyvocal museum into being with NYX

Rubén Salgado Pérez — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:15:26 +0000

A voice is never neutral. It carries where it comes from, what it has been through and whether it has been given space to be heard at all. And it rarely stays contained within a single body. It can extend, travel and gather, held between people as much as produced by one. A shared field rather than an individual expression.
The work of NYX begins precisely here. As a collective (poly)vocal ensemble working across experimental music, performance and sound art, they have developed a practice that moves away from the idea of voice as something singular. Instead, they compose through attention and encounter, allowing sound to take shape through multiple bodies in relation to one another and to the environments they inhabit.
At the heart of their work is an understanding of voice as material. It is shaped by the bodies that produce it, by the histories they carry and by the conditions that allow them to be heard. As Music Director Sian O’Gorman reflects, a creative project “rarely begins at a single point.” It emerges through a coming together of people, place and intention. Before meaning settles, there is already a movement between interior and exterior, something crossing a threshold and becoming audible.
Their new live commission First Breath, made for the opening of V&A East Museum, unfolds from that premise into something more specific: if voice is the most primary technology through which we express and make meaning, what happens when many voices encounter a museum sitting with the oldest question of all — not what we make, nor how, but why?
The Why We Make galleries, which occupy a central place in the new museum, frame making as a transhistorical and polyvocal condition, where multiple voices, histories and forms of knowledge are held in relation rather than resolved into a single narrative. NYX’s practice offers a way of encountering these ideas through experience, where making unfolds between people, in real time, and through the act of listening as much as sounding.
Creative Producer Philippa Neels describes an artistic process that begins with a curatorial frame and expands collectively, becoming increasingly attentive to surroundings. “Who owns a live experience?” she asks. “When the architecture, the public and our communities are half of what a performance really is.”
The shape of First Breath will not be determined in advance. It depends on acoustics, on attention, on who is present and how they listen. Collective voice becomes here a way of embracing difference rather than dissolving it. Multiple voices remain distinct while entering into relation, held through systems of attention that allow listening to become structural.
V&A East's staircases are central to how the commission thinks about the museum. Each step carries a relation to what has just happened and what is about to unfold, producing a continuous sense of transition. Embodiment Director Imogen Knight works closely with this quality, tracing cycles of ascent and descent, of lying down and rising, of falling and pausing in suspension.
Every culture has a way of beginning. For Sian and Philippa, who grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, a building is opened through a pōwhiri, a welcoming ceremony that activates a relationship between people and place, the past and the present. As Philippa explains, in Tikanga Māori, that act is guided by a karanga, a female calling voice that acts as a bridge between physical and spiritual worlds.
While NYX are not seeking to replicate this ceremony, they are informed by these forms of orientation, where voice is used to meet a space, to listen to how it absorbs or reflects sound, and to trace its contours through resonance. “It’s a bit like arriving in a dark cave with a torch,” Philippa says, “using light to understand where you are.”
Through these gestures, First Breath gathers multiple understandings of what it means to begin. A first breath can signal arrival, but it can also hold anticipation or uncertainty. It sits just before articulation, at the point where something internal is about to enter a shared space.
This is what visitors will find when entering the Why We Make galleries: an active encounter with the conditions of making and with their own position within them. Who has been given space to make? Whose voices have been recorded, preserved, amplified? Whose have gone unheard?
First Breath holds these questions through what Sian calls a gradient of participation. Some people will remain in observation. Others will move toward sounding. Both are understood as forms of presence. There is no correct way to take part, only different distances from which to listen, or to add a voice to what is already there.
First Breath takes place on 25 April at V&A East Museum, with NYX and collaborators activating the building through voice and movement across the day, holding space for these questions to be felt rather than answered. Workshops exploring voice, embodiment and collective practice will run throughout, culminating in a Drone Circle, a shared field of sound that visitors are invited to enter through listening, through presence, or through contributing their own voice. NYX will be joined by afromerm, Katya Barton, Rhianna Compton, Ushara Dilrukshan, Damsel Elysium, Bones Tan Jones, Rachel Oyawale, AK Patterson, Plumm, Monique Sallé, Trans Chorus and Alicia Jane Turner.
This is an invitation to take part in a shared process of arrival. To listen, to sound, and to encounter making as something that happens between us.
A new beginning, held in common.
First Breath with NYX - V&A East Special event at V&A East Museum · V&A

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Mosaic reproductions in the late-Victorian Cast Courts: origins and techniques

Agnieszka Serdynska — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:36:26 +0000

This blog is part of a series on Henry Cole’s travel diaries, several of which are in the V&A’s collections. The Weston Cast Court brings together reproductions of a few of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance monuments, some of which have been traced back to...

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From Tehran to South Kensington: A Sarikhani Fellowship journey

Fuchsia Hart — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:31:12 +0000

It was a summer morning in Tehran when the war sirens blared. My suitcase lay packed by the door, ready for a flight that would never take off. In the days that followed, I watched...

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Apply now to become Young V&A’s Designer in The Shed 2026

Haidee Drew — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:13:39 +0000

Are you ready to bring your creativity to one of the most exciting design spaces in the UK? Young V&A is inviting early to mid‑career designers, studios, and collectives to apply for a six‑month public‑facing design...

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Bangladesh: Discovering a nation redefining itself

Meneesha Kellay — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:37:08 +0000

As Bangladesh enters a new democratic age after what has been widely reported as the first free and fair election held in the country for almost two decades, Meneesha Kellay, Lead Curator of an upcoming...

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Ketina Kol-Bo

Yuval Keshet — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:57:00 +0000

Ketina is a small, mischievous boy who can transform anything he finds into something entirely new. He builds fantastical vehicles and vessels and enlists insects as companions for his daring adventures...

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Affordable, original, relevant: Contemporary Lithographs Ltd.’s artistic mission

Kay Bannell — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:24:34 +0000

How would the everyday person encounter contemporary art in the 1930s? Commuters in the City were likely to pass designs by renowned artists of the day on London Transport’s innovative posters, and those outside of...

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