Past exhibitions

Past exhibitions at the UCL Urban Room

The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember 

11 June – 16 August 2025

The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, is an archive of materials including vinyls, posters, paintings and more, drawn from private African collections collected by Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai.

Summer Flowers – Wolff Architects Exhibition  

30/01/2025 – 26/05/2025

Urban Room and Wolff Architects celebrate the work of South African author Bessie Head. The exhibition is an invitation to listen, read and be immersed in the ideas of emancipatory spatial practices.

Memory Workshop Open Days

15/11/2024 - 11/12/2024

A series of workshops and conversations about technical, narrative, and ethical considerations when archiving and documenting contested histories and heritage.

In Practice II: Student Showcase

28/08/2024 - 02/11/2024

Explore creative, multidisciplinary work from students in the UCL SCCI Public History and the UCL Urban Lab Global Urbanism postgraduate programmes.

The In Practice ll Student Showcase demonstrates the students' diverse approaches to understanding today's social challenges, related to colonial legacies, urban change, and belonging. You will have the opportunity to engage with creative outputs such as zines, websites, interpretative installations, photography, and moving image.

Memory Work

05/07/2024 - 16/08/2024

Connecting researchers and practitioners from acorss UCL, the Memory Work exhibition explored the theme of memory in urban research, and how creative outputs might provide entry-points for understanding the complex evidence of urban investigations.

The exhibition showcased a range of work from members of the Urban Lab Steering Committee, spanning across disciplines, geographies and communities. Contributions came from people working in the fields of urbanism, architecture, geography, political science, planning, critical heritage studies, history and anthropology.

Sonia E. Barrett: Maplective

15/03/2024 - 15/06/2024

In the 'Maplective' exhibition, artist Sonia E. Barrett takes European tools instrumental in creating colonial power, such as desks, maps and cameras, and reconfigures them to do the cultural work they disrupted. Through creative workshops, sculpture, discussion and performance, Sonia worked with local communities in East London to respond to, and co-create, new sculptures that reframe the question: "What was here before?” 

Sonia has been working with groups of black and brown women, forming the 'East Bank map-lective', to shred and braid the maps of colonised and post colonised, coloniser and post coloniser territories. Find out more.

Undocumented? Migration on the edges of Europe

30/09/2024 - 29/02/2024

Co-curated by artist and academic Professor Nishat Awan, 'Undocumented?' explores journeys of migration as a series of video installations and situated vignettes from the edges of Europe. 

Grounded in original field research, the exhibition traces a route through the borderlands of the 'refugee crisis', narrating stories of migrant journeys and the clandestine crossing of borders. An unfinished and immersive 'Atlas of European Belonging' visualises Europe through its margins and the spaces of transit, movement and stasis produced by those on the move.

In Practice: Student Showcase

06/09/2023 - 28/10/2023

This showcase brings together student work from three postgraduate programmes: Public History, Global Urbanism, and Connected Enviornments. The range of presentations demonstrates their approaches to understanding today's social challenges relating to memory, identity, urban change, and technology.

All three programmes are located in the new UCL East and engage with the context of the area through site-based learning, and collaborations with local oraganisations and communities.

    SEEDED residency showcase

    01/08/2023 - 19/08/2023

    The SEEDED showcase brings together work created during and as a product of residencies as part of East Bank in London College of Fashion and UCL East Urban Room. The four artists have been embedded for five months to allow them to investigate and develop their practice on themes around social practise, activism, collective memory, urbanisation and community engagement.

    Audiences can expect to explore ideas of antifascist protest in east London with Mercedes Baptiste Halliday; unethical pay in the east London fashion industry from Toyin Gbomedo; sustainable styling in Easten Eurpean fashion with Noemi Gunea; and Somali identity and poetry with Naajia Ahmed.

    Testing Ground: an immersive sound and video exhibition

    31/05/2023 - 21/06/2023

    An exhibition of visual and sonic installations of contemporary and historic helicopter surveillance over London, Iraq and Belfast.  It shows techniques of aerial surveillance that were developed by the British Army over Belfast during the 30 year conflict - the so-called Troubles – these have now been adapted by the National Police Air Service for use over London and other UK mainland cities. This exhibition, derived from a project conceived by Henrietta Williams and Merijn Royaards, interweaves archival material gathered from the Imperial War Museum’s Northern Ireland Collection against contemporaneous video footage and sonic field recordings of helicopter surveillance at moments of protest in London.

    Navigating the System: A Boater Healthcare Exhibition

    24/03/2023 – 29/04/2023

    Navigating the System is a co-curated exhibition about London’s boater community and difficulties they face accessing healthcare, told through photographs by photojournalist Caitlin Vinicombe and testimonial accounts documented in research by Joseph Cook and Nura Ali.

    SE1 Stories: Community action in a London neighbourhood

    19/01/2023 – 03/03/2023

    SE1 Stories is a public history exhibition tracing four decades of community action, starting in Blackfriars in the 1970s. The exhibition has been created from a collection of thousands of photographs, and archives including the SE1 Newspaper publication that was produced from 1975-1991.