Exhibitions
How We Build Home
How We Build Home was a photography exhibition and installation (2022-2023) created and developed by GEM Collective in response to the Museum of the Home’s Rooms Through Time, and evolved into a particular exploration of how Black women build home, whether by and for themselves, or in relation.
Imagined by the late Dr. Azeezat Johnson, and developed with artist Oluwatosin (Wasi) Daniju, the project explored the many faces of home: those we have experienced, those we imagine, and the possibilities of home that we can build together.
Teenage Bedrooms
'Teenage Bedrooms' was an exhibition (2016-2017) that stepped into the homes of 26 London teenagers to explore the meaning and significance of contemporary teenage bedrooms. A combination of photographs, interviews, objects and an installation representing a teenager’s bedroom showed how identity, memory and friendship are expressed within these private spaces.
Swept Under the Carpet? Servants in London Households, 1600 to 2000
'Swept Under the Carpet?' was a free, special exhibition (2016) exploring domestic service and the experiences of servants living and working in middle-class homes over the last four hundred years. It showed the ways in which servants’ work formed the backbone of domestic life, giving a glimpse into a world often overlooked by historians.
The Aylesbury Estate as Home
'The Aylesbury Estate as Home' was a free exhibition (2016) exploring this large modernist high-rise estate in South London, as home. It focused on the history of the estate for its thousands of residents, from its utopian beginning in the late 1960s, to its emergence as a more ambiguous place in the 1980s, and current demolition and regeneration through photographs, architectural drawings, text and interviews with current residents.
Home Thoughts
What does home mean to you? This small display (2017-2018) described through personal stories, photographs and objects, experiences of making, keeping and being at home in London - from migration, religious practices and housework to leisure activities, celebrations and technology.
Who Once Lived in My House?
Coins, buttons and beads dropped through floorboards; names and dates or messages written on walls or scored in plaster; toys in garden soil; letters in the attic… This small but fascinating display (2013-2014) explored the different ways history is present in homes and people’s reflections on their homes as places where other people once lived.