Grace Ndiritu, ‘The Healing Pavilion’

Opening in November 2022, Wellcome Collection will present ‘The Healing Pavilion', a new art commission by British-Kenyan visual artist Grace Ndiritu.

‘The Healing Pavilion’ is an installation revealing violent pasts and hidden power dynamics at the foundation of Western museology while reflecting attitudes and practices towards African objects in many European museum collections. Consisting of two large-scale tapestries (‘Repair (1915)’ and ‘Restitution (1973)’) based on archival images from Wellcome Collection, London and the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin, the display will ask what has changed since these photographs were taken, while radically reimagining what textiles and architecture can do in a museum burdened by colonial history. 

‘Repair (1915)’ is based on a photograph taken in 1915 depicting junior staff members of the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. They are posing with human remains and collection objects from the Global South, many in the form of face masks and skulls. The sitting was staged in a gallery called the Hall of Primitive Medicine, which displayed predominantly non-European objects according to particular theories that othered, exoticised and marginalised the cultures they described. A century later, with many of these objects dispersed around the world, Ndiritu’s work calls for action needed to repair the history of collections. 

‘Restitution (1973)’ focuses on a photograph taken almost 60 years after ‘Repair (1915)’, at the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin. The portrait is believed to be an informal documentation of staff taken one day after work. In the centre of the image is the Mandu Yenu royal throne from the Kingdom of Bamum in Cameroon and the museum staff are sitting and leaning on it. This throne was a source of respect and signified power in its original context. It is currently on display at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and its contested history and future are still under discussion in Germany. 

The faces of those depicted in the original photograph used for ‘Restitution (1973)’ have been digitally altered to shift the attention away from their specific identities. By focusing directly on the interaction between the staff and the objects, Ndiritu asks instead what restitution for a history such as this might look like.

Ndiritu has been combining her artistic and esoteric spiritual practices since 2012. In her ongoing body of work entitled ‘Healing The Museum’, she has used socially engaged artwork to inspire non-rational ways of seeing and transforming the world to allow a different kind of future. This includes her reinterpretation of traditional indigenous architecture, most recently for the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Our Silver City: 2094’ at Nottingham Contemporary in 2021, which included ‘The Temple’, designed both as a modernist display structure and a spiritual technology.

For Wellcome Collection, she continues this investigation, this time inspired by Japanese Zen Buddhist temples, to create a pavilion that holds the tapestries while reactivating the museum as a space to encounter, contemplate, ask questions, exchange, listen, share and meditate. The pavilion is lined with walnut panels taken from Wellcome Collection’s ‘Medicine Man’ gallery (which closes shortly after this exhibition opens), so the structure embodies a physical transformation of the past. Through her practice, Ndiritu asks how we might energetically and architecturally reinvent the role of contemporary museums and transform these institutional spaces.  

Grace Ndiritu is a British-Kenyan artist whose artworks are concerned with the transformation of our contemporary world. She believes that most modern art institutions are out of sync with their audience’s everyday experiences, and that the widespread socio-economic and political changes that have taken place globally in the recent decades have further eroded the relationship between museums and their audiences. 

Ndiritu has been featured in the Guardian, Artforum, Art Review, TIME and Phaidon’s ‘The 21st-Century Art Book’. Her work is housed in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the British Council (London), LACMA (Los Angeles) and the Modern Art Museum (Warsaw). 

‘The Healing Pavilion’ is curated by Janice Li and Emily Sargent. It opens to the public on 24 November 2022 until 23 April 2023 and is free to visit. The exhibition will be accompanied by an audio walkthrough and guided meditation from the artist, accessible through the audio guide.

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Notes to editors

Visitor information

• ‘The Healing Pavilion’ opens in Gallery 2 from 24 November 2022 – 23 April 2023.
• Admission to Wellcome Collection is free.
• Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00 and Thursdays 10:00 to 20:00, closed Mondays.
• Address: Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. 

About Wellcome Collection 

Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library exploring health and human experience. Its mission is to challenge how we all think and feel about health by connecting science, medicine, life and art. It offers a changing programme of curated exhibitions, museum and library collections, and public events, in addition to a café. Wellcome Collection publishes books on what it means to be human, and collaborates widely to reach broad and diverse audiences, locally and globally.

Wellcome Collection actively develops and preserves collections for current and future audiences and, where possible, offers new narratives about health and the human condition. Wellcome Collection works to engage underrepresented audiences, including d/Deaf, disabled, neurodivergent, and racially minoritised communities.

Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome, which supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. We support discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and we’re taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, infectious disease, and climate and health.

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About ‘Medicine Man’

Wellcome Collection will close its long-running permanent display, ‘Medicine Man’, marking a turning point for Wellcome Collection as it prepares for a major project to transform how the collection is presented over the coming years, alongside the museum’s programme and research. The process will amplify the voices of those who have been previously erased or marginalised from museums and bring their stories of health and humanity to Wellcome Collection’s heart. ‘Medicine Man’ closes 27 November 2022.

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