vPPR Architects is a women-led architecture practice focusing on the crossover of art and architecture. From our studios in London, Liverpool and Hamburg, we collaborate with artists, curators, collectors, gallerists and cultural institutions to create temporary and permanent display spaces for art. Our projects include exhibition designs, gallery refurbishments and new build spaces, embracing sustainable strategies and aesthetics. Our approach is based on an academic reading of architectural context and how this can be made conceptually relevant to the curator or artist working in the space. We focus on themes of transparency, layering and framing. vPPR was set up in 2009 by Tatiana von Preussen, Catherine Pease and Jessica Reynolds. LONDON (HEAD OFFICE)
vPPR Architects
22 Prince of Wales Road, London NW5 3LG
+44 207 729 6168 www.vPPR.co.uk admin@vPPR.co.uk
LIVERPOOL
vPPR Architects 44 Canal Street Liverpool L20 8QU
HAMBURG
vPPR Architektur GmbH
Große Elbstraße 279 22767 Hamburg Germany
+49 40 60574868
Selected Exhibition Designs
The British Pavilion, Venice
Listening All Night To The Rain, John Akomfrah
Royal Academy of Arts
Marina Abramovic
Barbican Art Gallery
RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology
Barbican Art Gallery
Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics
Barbican Art Gallery Masculinities: Liberation through Photography
White Cube
Memory Palace
Hepworth Wakefield
Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes
Basement floor plan Piano Nobile
BRITISH PAVILION
Status Completed 2024
Title Listening All Night To the Rain
Artist Sir John Akomfrah
Location Art Biennale, Venice
Type Exhibition Design
Client British Council
The exhibition begins on the exterior of the British Pavilion’s 19th century neoclassical building, with a large three-screen film installation suspended onto its façade. This artistic intervention brings imagery and voices from the Global South to the forefront, honouring those who have been marginalised by the legacies of imperialism. Inside the Pavilion, film screens embedded within sculptural installations are inspired by the structure and form of altarpieces from religious sites. Each gallery space layers together a specific colour field, influenced by the paintings of American artist Mark Rothko, in order to highlight the ways in which abstraction can represent the fundamental nature of human drama.
ROYAL ACADEMY MARINA ABRAMOVIC
Status 23 Sept 2023 - 1 Jan 2024
Location The Royal Academy
Curator Andrea Tarsia with Rebecca Bray
Display 100 works including films, sculptures, photographs and other works
Heritage Grade II* Listed
Sustainability Repurposing of existing plinths from RA summer exhibition
This major exhibition presents key moments from performance artist Marina Abramović’s career through sculpture, video, installation and performance. It is the first solo exhibition of a women artist across the entire Main Galleries in the RA’s 250 year history. The exhibition is divided into two parts: the body and the spirit. The design includes bespoke and complex AV structures that were interchangeable between live performances and recorded performances. Although simple and lightweight in appearance, these structures hide huge amounts of AV cabling and equipment, as well as forming framing devices, in dialogue with the strong enfilades of the RA galleries, to draw the viewers’ attention to relationships between different works. Colour is used as a key device to reference political contexts and immersive experiences. As in our other exhibitions, the design seeks to bring together a contextual reading of the gallery’s architecture with the artist and curator’s conceptual approach.
BARBICAN ART GALLERY RE/SISTERS: A LENS ON GENDER AND ECOLOGY
Status 20 Feb - 23 Aug 2020
Location Barbican Art Gallery, London
Curator Alona Pardo with Colm Guo-Lin Peare
Display Over 50 photographic and film works including installations
Heritage Grade II Listed
Sustainability Repurposing of all existing vitrines
This significant group exhibition explores the relationship between gender and ecology, and highlights the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet. Featuring around 50 international women and gender non-conforming artists, RE/SISTERS features work from emerging and established artists across photography and film. Works in the exhibition explore how women’s understanding of our environment has often resisted the logic of capitalist economies which place the exploitation of the planet at its centre. The exhibition design consists of organic forms and softened edges, alluding to a politics of care. Although the Brutalism of the Barbican Gallery is often considered a ‘masculine’ architecture, it features many rounded edges and soft corners that the exhibition design references and magnifies. This is the third of our exhibition designs to navigate and create clarity within the complex Barbican Gallery.
BARBICAN ART GALLERY CAROLEE SCHNEEMENN: BODY POLITICS
Status 8 Sept 2022-8 Jan 2023
Location Barbican Art Gallery, London
Curator Lotte Johnson with Chris Bayley
Display 13 films, 22 sculptural objects, 41 paintings, 205 works on paper, 153 performance photos
Heritage Grade II Listed
Sustainability Use of fabric has low embodied energy
Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics is the first extensive survey of Carolee Schneemann’s work in the UK, tracing her feminist practice over six decades, including sculptural assemblages, multi-media performances and rarely seen archival material. The exhibition design references her performances, using full height stage flats tinted with an atmospheric orange gradient (an orange that is often used in her work), together with coloured vitrines and curved plinths. These semi-transparent scrims enclose differently themed spaces while allowing views across the whole gallery. The scrims create a unifying theme for hundreds of disparate objects and vastly different media, without overwhelming the works themselves. These soft, lightweight, feminine drapes contrast and compliment the heavy concrete masculinity of the Barbican Gallery.
Carolee Schneemann Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London. Photo: Marcus J Leith
BARBICAN ART GALLERY MASCULINITES: LIBERATION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY
Status 20 Feb - 23 Aug 2020
Location Barbican Art Gallery, London
Curator Alona Pardo with Chris Bayley
Display 250 photographs
Heritage Grade II Listed
Sustainability Black valchromat frames made from made from recycled pine wood and mill waste, bound with organic non- toxic wood fibre bonding resin
“Masculinities: Liberation through Photography” is a substantial group exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed through photography and film from the 1960s to today. The exhibition design comprises a series of full height black valchromat architectural frames that act as viewing devices, bringing into dialogue the photographic artworks, the brutalist architecture and the visitors. Playful small frames and periscopes are also introduced between walls and even out into the Barbican courtyard. The frames make connections between artworks that are not physically proximate and also relate to themes of penetration, gaze and framing that are prevalent in the curatorial approach.
Location White Cube Art Gallery, Bermondsey and Mason’s Yard
Curator Susan May, Susanna Greeves
Display 100+ artworks
Heritage N/A
Sustainability
Modular design with mechanical fixings enabled screens to be reused subsequently at other locations including Frieze Art Fair London
Memory Palace is a large-scale group exhibition extending across White Cube’s London galleries in Bermondsey and Mason’s Yard. Celebrating White Cube’s 25th Anniversary the exhibition features more than 100 recent works by over 40 artists. The exhibition leads the viewer through six aspects of memory: Historical, Autobiographical, Traces, Transcription, Collective and Sensory, with works by Christian Marclay, Tracy Emin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Antony Gormley and many more. The expanded metal mesh echoes the ceiling of the Bermondsey gallery, creating a backdrop for the works of art that is industrial (so strong enough to mount works) but also lightweight and semi-transparent (providing an overview of 25 years of the White Cube). The screens are modular and can be assembled to create different zones as well as being easy to disassemble and reuse elsewhere, including in both White Cube’s gallery spaces and at Frieze Art Fair.
HEPWORTH, WAKEFIELD ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW: HUMAN LANDSCAPES
Status 21 Oct 2017 - 28 Jan 2018
Location Hepworth Wakefield
Curator Andrew Bonacina
Display 100+ scultpures and archival
Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes is the first UK retrospective of the work of the much-overlooked Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow. The exhibition features more than 100 works created between 1956 and 1972 including drawings, photography and sculpture, incorporating Szapocznikow’s characteristic use of cast body parts, many of which she transformed into everyday objects like lamps or ashtrays. The exhibition is divided into early figurative works, and later, more abstract, disfigured works, reflected in the colours and geometries of the modular display design: from cool colours and orthogonal geometries to warm colours and curved frames. The scrim frames were inspired by the artist’s use of translucent partitions in her studio to mask clutter. The fabric throws sculptures behind into silhouette while providing focus for the detail of those in the foreground.
PLAY GROUNDWITH(OUT)
Initially designed for the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale as part of the Garden of Privatised Delights at the British Pavilion, vPPR’s interactive installation and soundscape ‘Play with(out) Grounds’ focuses on public space for young people.
EXHIBITION DESIGN FULL LIST
British Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale: John Akomfrah
British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale: The Garden of Privatised Delights
Royal Academy of Arts : Marina Abramovic
Royal Academy of Arts: Michael Craig-Martin
Barbican Art Gallery : RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology
Barbican Art Gallery: Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics
Barbican Art Gallery: Masculinities: Liberation through Photography
White Cube: Memory Palace
Hepworth Wakefield: Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes
Cumbria Deeptime: Piet Oudolf ‘SEED’ pavilion
National Trust: Plas Newydd ‘Behind the Stage’
Wellcome Collection: In the Air
Science Gallery, Kings College: Dark Matter
Science Gallery, Kings College: AI and Ethics
The Ruskin Library, University of Lancaster: Museum of the Near Future
100% Design: Foam Dome
Cubitt Gallery: Leonora Carrington
Architecture Foundation: Stirling and Gowan’s Leicester Engineering Building
V&A and London College of Fashion Open Doors: Vote 100
Women’s Euros: Emma Smith Supercompensation Cycle
AWARDS
2024 RIBA London Awards Three shorlisted (Camden Market Canopy; Wembley
Olympic Way and steps; White House School)
2023 NLA Awards, WINNER (Camden Market Canopy)
2023 Brick Awards, WINNER (White House School)
2023 ASLA New York, MERIT (Camden Highline)
2023 BD Education Architect of the Year, Finalist (White House School, Two Hands Nursery, Alleyn’s)
2023 Architectural Review MJ Long Prize shortlisted: Michelle Wong for White House School
2023 AJ Awards, Shortlisted (Idlewild Mews, White House School)
