Now showing: superMATTER and THIRST: In Search of Freshwater

superMATTER

The Gallery. 26 Lillie Rd, London SW6 1TS

12.00 - 18.00 daily until 29 July

superMATTER - one of the three platforms of the RCA’s Interior Design MA - has been working within the context of the Earls Court Development site, exploring the reuse of site materials while imagining speculative futures.

The work is now on display at The Gallery on Lillie Road until 29 July - it's a chance to see the work, including 1:1s, and the development site.

With Dr. Tania López Winkler as leader, URGE co-founder Ella Doran as co-leader and Ian Hunter, the studio centres around the theme ‘Matter out of Place’ with an invitation to play with order, systems, boundaries, and the question: what if…?

All projects explore the absurd and preposterous not as sentiment, but as embedded infrastructure, as architecture, and as resistance.

The projects respond to the site’s borders: its social fabric, political territories, and physical divides. A series of briefs over the year encouraged students to interrogate the absurd and challenge these borders.

A particular focus of the studio was a social group often rendered invisible or considered ‘out of place’: construction site workers.

Here is a preview.

Yuyin Xue - Plot. Pot. Plate

A building as a plot to blend food, rest, and care into a self-sustaining growing community.

The project “‘reimagines the site line of Lillie Road’s Victorian Street and how construction workers live, rest, and connect within temporary urban environments. Rooted in the cycles of planting, water use, and communal care, the project envisions a growing community, care-driven space where nature and architecture coexist...

...through modular design and interventions for the entry of light into the buildings, it empowers workers to shape, adapt, and inhabit the space on their own terms. By prioritising food, rest, and shared experiences, the proposal challenges conventional living standards on construction sites and introduces a model of spatial design grounded in dignity, freedom, self-care, and collective resilience.”

Eunice Wan – Corolla Coalition
A bench and a journey through material thresholds toward reconciliation.

The project "guides estranged individuals through the journey of reconciliation. Starting with a distortive barrier to ease the discomfort of direct confrontation, participants reflect and refamiliarise themselves with the other. As they advance onwards, perforations reveal more visual connection in tandem with emotional progress.

Finally, the culmination of a shared seating area encourages open, vulnerable, face-to-face conversation. This thoughtful progression creates a safe and gentle space for resolving conflict and rediscovering connection."

Zoë Onatoye - Green Fleeting Moments

A temporary, meanwhile space, inspired by the smoke break.

Senia Gomes – The Fabric of Care
A space for cooking and a nursery, communing elders and children.

Kerem Edmonds – Factory Reset
An immersive silent orb-space for recalibration without your phone.

Mandy Berbari – Sonic Sanctum
Acoustic chambers for screaming as an emotional release and a healthy habit.

Eda Coskun – S(KIP) Hotel
A skip reimagined as a soft, relaxing place for site workers.

Yuxuan Wang – Under My Own Roof
A foldable shelter that adapts to site and circumstance.

Jianan Wang
Textile-based spatial units stitched from fast fashion waste.

Qisen Yang
A space opened up for flexibility, cyclists and site workers.

Anya Popattanachai – Apothecary
A proposition to see a building as a patient, repaired through acts of making.

Francesca Woodman – Ar-rest-ing Suspended Moments
A reframing of an underpass as a place for pause, breath, and awareness.

Zhuoya Gu
An evolving billboard giving visibility and voice to site workers.

Sham Salim – Blurring Raw Borders
A modular intervention for site workers to rest and use the 'loo with a view.'

You can follow superMATTER on Instagram.

The Gallery - ECDC

ECDC

Thirst: In Search of Freshwater

Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE

10.00 - 18.00 Tue-Sun (-20.00 Thu) until February 2026

'Thirst: In Search of Freshwater' explores humanity’s relationship with water through 125 objects curated by Janice Li.

A "marvellous catalogue" includes work by Gideon Mendel, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Susan Schuppli, Anthony Acciavatti, Dala Nasser, Adib Dada, M’hammed Kilito, and Adam Rouhana. New commissions are by Raqs Media Collective, Karan Shrestha and Feifei Zhou and Zahirah Suhaimi (SEACoast).

The exhibition explores how freshwater shapes health, ecosystems, and everyday life from Mesopotamia and Victorian London to modern-day Nepal and Singapore. It also addresses the consequences of mismanagement — including the spread of disease — and highlights community-led responses to the global water crisis.

Thirst is a universal human experience shared with most living beings, and with only 3% of the water on Earth being freshwater, our land thirsts too. But as Laura Cumming writes in The Observer, it is a show "more about the planet’s supplies of water: their terrible lack or their ruinous abundance in the form of floods."

Gideon Mendel's five-screen video installation 'Deluge' documents how towns have been transformed over nearly two decades. As one screen follows individuals returning to their homes filled with water, another pauses on submerged landscapes and cityscapes in Pakistan, Germany, Bangladesh and the US.

If you can't get there, here are two interviews with Mendel about his work.

There is also an accompanying book, 'Thirst: In Search of Freshwater', available from the Wellcome Collection, featuring leading writers Robert Macfarlane, Elif Shafak and Lucy Jones. A café menu (which you can find here) developed with Wonderwater reveals the water footprint of your food.

Thirst: In Search of Freshwater

Our new exhibition explores humanity’s vital connection with freshwater – an essential source of life and pillar of good health for people and planet.

Wellcome Collection