The Museum as IKEA

Nestled in London’s “fastest growing innovation campus” for “innovators, disruptors, [and] visionaries,” next to start-ups, modular studios for “creatives,” and a housing developer, is the V&A East Storehouse, a new branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where the museum is making its archive publicly accessible for the first time. Part of the Here East arts and culture technology park in Stratford, this newly opened V&A site was built on the grounds of the former Olympic Media Centre in East London. Prior to that, the space had been a housing estate and industrial area. The many lives of this land are emblematic of London’s architecture, where a former dog-racing track can become the site of a new museum and across the city, it is common to see a building from the 14th century next to a 1960s office block, a Victorian building, and a new build. I expected the museum to be an exception from this; thoroughly categorized or structured with its presentation of wares. As it turns out, this architectural patchwork of a city is not so different from the absurd mishmash of objects stashed together at the V&A East Storehouse. The press for the V&A site highlights that visitors can “order” up to five objects from the museum’s archive to view if booked up to two weeks prior to visiting. I had missed this window, so it was unclear what I would get to see. 

The V&A museum, named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, first opened in South Kensington, London in 1852. The V&A now has five museums, including the Young V&A also in East London, a location in Dundee, Scotland, and Stoke-on-Trent, with a second location of the new V&A East, as a companion to the Storehouse, slated to open in 2026. The concept for the Storehouse arose in 2015 after Blythe House, the west London storage facility housing much of the V&A’s collection, was sold off to the government. Faced with finding a new home for 600,000+ objects, the V&A decided on a new purpose-built space presented as a working museum for visitors to see behind the scenes. 250,000 objects are stored at the new location, and according to the publicly available online catalog, the other objects are housed at the South Kensington location. The goal for such a site, according to deputy director Tim Reeves, was to create a space that serves the public at a time when many are cynical as to whether museums are actually for the people. The design of the V&A East attempted to follow suit. The public can see into the designated Conservation Room of the Storehouse—from an awkwardly positioned glass window outlook one level above the workspace, in the outer section of the hall—at the employees working on the conservation of objects. Behind the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the exterior V&A facade stands a second exterior structure of burnt orange steel-reinforced beams. The beams overtly resemble the towering shelving units inside which display an archive of ceramics, lamps, and building fragments alongside shoes, hat pins, and furnishings. This experience of different levels and the suggested visibility of the open shelving and the glass, which is nevertheless still a wall, creates a hierarchy between the visitor and what the visitor sees. Despite its promises of transparency, to attend the V&A East Storehouse, I would later realize, was to leave more confused than when one arrives.

The answer to what I would actually see at the V&A lay behind the two sets of likely airlocked doors into the Weston Collections Hall. Designed by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro—who have also worked on the High Line, 15 Hudson Yards, and the Shed at Hudson Yards—the Weston Collections Hall is built as an atrium: the first and second floors serve as galleries around the ground level of the three-story building. 

Its design again announces the access made possible at the museum; everything is on show, perhaps too much so. The hall is slick and brightly lit, with large ceiling lighting panels in the center of the room that mimic a natural skylight. The stairwell features tube lights that run the length of the underside of the staircase above. Corridors and galleries branch off from the main hall. Few objects are behind glass; most are stored in open wooden crates, as if in the process of being unpacked. Still in the staircase, to the side on shelves, a series of busts rest in the open wooden crates with corresponding SKU barcodes only scannable to staff (unlike the select QR codes I was to later come across). The access to the objects was literal, but only visually. Otherwise, I knew nothing about them, nothing about whom the busts depict, what time period or locality they come from. This was a primer of sorts for what I was about to experience: a constant bemusement at what I was surrounded by, and the sheer obscenity of seeing a museum’s extensive and diverse archive. Diller Scofidio + Renfro states on their website that the intention was to “lean into the delirium of the collection.” Delirium is the right word. Though I’ve barely stepped foot inside, it already feels unwieldy to move so abruptly from one object to the next, between time periods, countries, and materials, with no context. 

The best way to give a sense of this space is to imagine the last stage at IKEA before going to check out. There, instead of being organized and contextualized via lifestyle-suggestive model-furnished rooms, IKEA products are stacked in numbered rows in a mixture of boxed and unboxed wares. When I had the opportunity to learn more about certain objects via dispersed QR codes, I had to consult numbered rows. The IKEA-ness was not just a consequence of both the shop and this museum being storage facilities. With its hefty selection of postmodernist chairs and tables, the collections hall visually resembled a shop to me rather than an exhibition. I found myself pondering not the historical origins of the items but what I would want for my home, as I eyed the smooth ‘S’ curve on the corner of a wooden coffee table. Still mid-thought on preferred table design, I kept catching in the corner of my eye an old painting, or a ceramic, or a vase, or another unidentified vessel relic. The IKEA-ness even extended to the very building materials of the Storehouse. The cafe furnishings, like the benches on which visitors can sit, and the lockers to stow belongings in the foyer, designed by Thomas Randall-Page, are all made of plywood, a material extensively used at IKEA. (Incidentally, the technology park houses a business called “Plykea” specifically for building plywood surfaces for IKEA countertops and the like.) The plywood benches for repose, alongside the neat uniform grey palette of steel storage structures, walls, and flooring on all levels, gave a consistency to the space, offsetting the scattered, uncurated collection.

After my first dabble in window shopping, I saw glass floor tiles ahead in the center of the room. I was apprehensive to tread on them. It took a moment to accept that these tiles would not break with the weight of human bodies. It wasn’t just the unwarranted fear of the fragility of glass but what lay below the glass. I was standing above a set of colonnades on the inaccessible basement floor below. From the floral and plant motif tiles on the marble structure, and a sense of the many objects ‘acquired’ by the V&A during British imperialism, I could guess that this was from South Asia. It was a strange feeling to arrive above this colonnade with such little information. To learn anything about it, I had to scan the QR code, which directs viewers to the V&A website to learn more about the Agra Colonnade from the 1630s. 

While the purported goal of the V&A Storehouse is to openly present what might otherwise remain stowed away, to begin public dialogue on the extensive artistic archival collections in the UK, when learning about these stacked objects is largely consigned to scrolling on a phone—a departure from engaging with the physicality of what is in front of you—and where there is little physical space to contemplate each object— many are not paired with QR codes—the works from the outset feel stripped. I found myself contending abruptly with the V&A’s archive, but only briefly. To be forced to turn to the phone constantly ‘to learn’ made the phone, rather than the collection, the landing place for my attention and uneasiness. How bizarre to attend a museum that encouraged me to turn away from the physical space and toward the digital.

The sheer expanse of dizzying displays further culled any opportunity for dialogue with the V&A’s archive. So too did the lack of any method of organizing the displays. The only explanation for item placement was supposedly weight and size, but given the obscene number of dressers on every floor and each level of the shelves, they seemed thrown together with no regard for order. The effect was disorienting, as if we were all on a careening ship and hadn’t yet gotten our sea legs. (One large storage container for a room-sized display happened to also look like the base of a capsized ship.) On one puritanical wooden dresser, carved with visual depictions of violence, bore an inscription that read: “MY|HOUSE|SHALL|BE|CALLED|THE|HOUSE|OF|PRAYER|BUT|YE|HAVE|MADE|IT|A|DEN|OF|THIEVES.” Intrigued as to whether this was a form of house security to ward off thieves from the belongings inside or to remind the owner to not commit sin as they got dressed every morning, but with no guiding curation, my mind wandered. Figuratively, this sat snug up against a painted metal recycling bin from the long-running Glastonbury festival. Around the corner, I glimpsed a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed office that I thought would provide a break from my bewilderment: I peeked inside through the window opening, into the softly lit, two-toned room of swamp cypress plywood and plush cream furnishings that I expected to see, but also inconceivably, next to the desk, a bust of Queen Nefertiti. Unsurprisingly, the bust was not featured in the photos of the office from the V&A’s collection prior to its display at the Storehouse. These placements raise the question of how the value of objects are defined—whether determined by the object’s intended function or who it serves—and how a viewer’s understanding of the importance and purpose of an object is impeded when so much is squeezed together with minimal context or, as with the Nefertiti bust, deliberately placed in a nonsensical setting. The setting certainly devalues the object and seems offensive; there is no text to tell the viewer about the bust, the craftsmanship cannot be seen up close when randomly buried in the back of a mid-century wood-panelled office; the collapse of periodization feels kitsch.

Not everything in the museum is so haphazardly thrown together. Scattered throughout are several room-sized displays, which contain one single item, with a measure of curation, and which act as gallery offshoots from the atrium, and main exhibits within the Storehouse. Among the artifacts that have rooms to themselves are a large wood beam curved casing protecting a ceiling from Torrijos, Spain, built circa 1490 and an enlarged recreation of Picasso’s painting ‘Two Women Running along the Beach (1922)’ that the stage designer Prince Alexander Schervashidze painted for the backdrop of the musical comedy ‘Le Train Bleu.’ (Picasso, incidentally, was so impressed with this large-scale copy of his painting that he signed it himself.) These select works, the Storehouse deems worthy of supplying some wall text, providing background without having to scan a QR code and scroll on a phone, but the text is still limited and, in several cases, lazy. It’s unclear, too, why these specific works are deemed significant enough to have entire rooms to themselves, beyond often being literal preserved rooms or parts of rooms, such as the Frankfurt Kitchen in the collection. Gazing at these works, I felt exorbitantly lucky to see this ceiling from 1490 or this enormous stage cloth without leaving London. But that having the space to contemplate and appreciate the craftsmanship and design of these works, rather than displayed amongst unlabelled, random, assorted objects, was the exception in a museum, seemed bizarre. I began to get an itching feeling that maybe I shouldn’t be seeing what I’m seeing. 

My itch, I soon realized, was in response to how little I was learning. I felt like a window shopper, those most itinerant of voyeurs: wedging one foot in the door, peeking in, then dashing back out. But this was not IKEA. I was ready for more than testing the firmness of a sofa or mattress before moving onto shower curtains. To be privy to a large-scale museum archive open to the public for the first time that went well beyond what I initially expected in the volume of objects, I hoped for more context. Instead of any cultural exchange, the power dynamics between the visitor and the archive felt off. I could largely only experience the interiors and objects aesthetically. Maybe, I wondered, I wouldn’t be experiencing the pang of being an undesired tourist driving up prices if this entire endeavour had taken place at the museum’s main branch in West London, rather than an area of East London that has recently been redeveloped and heralded as a future creative hub by Reeves. Furthermore, he called the residents of East London (an unclear label for a largely populated area comprising many neighborhoods— had he meant the neighborhood of Stratford, or the borough of Newham, or indeed the entirety of East London?) a “not-typical” museum-going crowd. The answer was to plop a museum in East London, rather than think about who the museum serves, what people might want to see at a museum, and other ways in which museums can be made more accessible.

In all fairness, the Storehouse did attempt a self-reflexive look at itself, yet only when it came to looted objects. Looting seemed to be the only way the Storehouse was capable of questioning its choices. Along one of the few corridors with objects protected behind glass cabinets, is the Maqdala Cup 1872-73, one of the few examples of curatorial insertion here. The choice to display the cup is intended as a counterpoint to the museum’s possession of looted materials: the silver cup is displayed in front of a selection of books, including texts on looting and works by cultural theorists and postcolonial thinkers Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Strangely, though, this particular cup is not looted. Made in Birmingham to celebrate the violence of British imperialism, the cup in fact depicts a violent, looting raid by the British Army at Ethiopian Emperor Tewedros’s fort at Maqdala in 1868. (Curiously, the objects looted from Maqdala are in the V&A collection but are not on display). The corresponding text asks, ‘What should we do with looted objects?’ The answer, as it turns out, is not much. Due to the 1983 Heritage Act in the UK, which restricts select museums from disposing of objects from their collections, these artefacts are ‘stuck’ in the V&A’s collection. But to simply pose the question is not enough. Was the presentation of the books alongside the cup intended to provoke visitors to contend more actively with the endless abundance of objects looted from elsewhere that exist in the archives of museums and castles in the British Isles? Or were we just supposed to marvel? Given that this object is the furthest the museum goes at discussing looted objects in its archive, it felt again like mustering a half-formed thought before abandoning it for the next.

The sore subject of reparations and the return of stolen goods is often in the British press. Presently, neighboring France is discussing a bill to streamline the process of returning artworks and cultural artefacts looted from its former, mostly African, colonies; no such law is being debated in Britain. Few weeks pass without developments and stalling around Britain loaning (in lieu of returning) the Elgin Marbles to Greece. The Elgin Marbles, pilfered by Lord Elgin from the Parthenon Temple in the early 1800s, consist of a collection of artwork from the Parthenon that the British Museum holds. In 2021, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted the antiquities were legally acquired and would remain in the UK, much to the consternation of the Greeks. (Current President of Greece, Constantine Tassoulas, has called the return of the marbles “the most reasonable global cultural demand of our time.” While there are certainly more urgent cultural demands, it’s hard to not think of how the marbles have been used---most recently, they were treated as little more than fashionable background displays at a £2,000-a-ticket ball the British Museum hosted---and clearly ought to be brought back home.) Since Johnson’s remarks, there’s been a yo-yo with subsequent Prime Ministers: cancelled meetings, announcements of progress, further conversations. In other words, no actual progress, though it is supposed to be “95 percent agreed.” Beyond the marbles, British museums are allowed to loan illicitly obtained artefacts, and only to loan them. Many nations of course will not agree to any such notion which falls short of a full return. Aside from the sheer absurdity of not returning the enormous number of illegally obtained artifacts, there is the added insult of British museums’ failure to keep a catalog of these objects and the security failures of maintaining these collections. As a result, they get lost.

Boasting the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, the V&A lists its permanent collection as housing over 2.8 million objects. An annual report from 2023-2024 puts this number under 2 million, and closer to 1 million objects are listed in its database. The cause of the disparities in information are not determined, but the British Museum’s recent mishaps are an indicator. In May 2023, the British Museum, which is estimated to hold about 8 million artefacts, reported 1,500 missing items. The following summer, a further 268 artefacts were reported missing. Similarly, the V&A has acknowledged 180 items missing, unsure whether they are lost or stolen. Presumably the V&A also cannot keep track of the size of its collection, due to its enormity, a grave problem given that the function of museums is to preserve cultural heritage. Does the lack of curation hide the gaps in the archive? 

The curatorial stance throughout is one of feigned transparency with sparse wall text, unknown objects within reach, and a viewer cast out from learning. How should a vast and diverse collection, acquired through a multitude of means---including illegal ones---be presented? Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has written on the history of curating in several books and interviewed pioneering postwar art curators from the 50s and 60s, when the role of the curator transitioned from a museum-based role of presenting and caring for artwork to an educational one: contextualizing collections, synthesizing information and discourse, and introducing viewers to artistic movements. Obrist determines the primary responsibility of the curator as instigating “a protest against forgetting,” a concept termed by historian Eric Hobsbawm. For Obrist, this cause has only become more urgent when people are inundated with information, which heightens amnesia rather than improving or producing memory. Through exhibition text, essays, and catalogs, the curator fosters a potential social relationship between artist, artwork and viewer, but the viewer at the V&A is denied this potential cultural exchange or social relationship. Instead visitors can peer from above, look down, and drop in on the visual pleasures of an exhibit, perpetuating the amnesia that could have been avoided with more extensive curation. 

The only opportunity for seemingly genuine exchange at the Storehouse is offered not to the viewers but to the local community. As it stands, it’s unclear if this dialogue is even effective or, more likely, if it’s just another crutch the museum relies on to avoid answering the questions about what to do with its collection. Down a nearby corridor, a wall text titled ‘Remaking the Agra Colonnade’ is written from the perspective of a collective—it is entirely unclear who—which states the V&A “invited us to collaborate on a project to remake sections of the Agra Colonnade as a way to learn about the skills and labour of past makers.”  This collective is only identified as an East London community, again, a deceptively vague, monolithic classification made particularly ironic by the fact that the museum borders Hackney and Newham, the latter, the most ethnically diverse and fourth most populated borough in the city. How legitimate or extensive is the community involvement, then? Based on the language, it could feasibly be a group of only, say, twelve people. The only instance where this exchange is specified is in the collaboration with former residents of one of the exhibitions, the Robin Hood Gardens Estate.

The exterior facade of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate is the only installation to traverse all three floors of the Storehouse. Its haunting prominence led me to question, for all of a second, if I was standing on top of the graveyard of the former social housing estate, despite it being three miles away in Poplar. The Robin Hood Gardens Estate, designed by architects Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, was a renowned Brutalist housing estate. Like many estates throughout Britain, it was subject to years of under-investment and subsequently fell into decline. After news of potential demolition spread, a campaign led by a group of prominent architects applied for the building to be recognized with listed status. The V&A did not support this campaign. The application was rejected. Two years later, the demolition of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate began. When the V&A announced it had secured a three-story slice of “an important building by important architects,” there was outcry from activists and residents. This was an enactment of social cleansing and artwashing in London, they said, where working class aesthetics are celebrated while homes are destroyed. 

The V&A has attempted to absorb some of this criticism by exhibiting the estate. The second floor exhibit, a mock-up recreation of the interior of a maisonette flat, falls back once again on the style of the architecture: a design to enjoy, devoid of the people. The inside homes in the block, while still absent of people, feels more sensitive on the top floor, in artist Do Ho Suh’s film ‘Past The Concrete’ which he saw as an archival opportunity. His film documents the inner fabric of the vacant homes mid-demolition in 2018, as the camera continuously traverses up through the floors with no breaks from the perspective of where the walls would be, to try to give a sense of the building’s energy. The standout level was easily the first floor, which focused on the sociality that brutalism enables.  A series of films and interviews led by former residents notes how wonderful it had been to grow up on the estate, as well as the changing landscape of the surrounding area once the financial hub Canary Wharf rose up. The residents' complaints of the transformation of the neighborhood reflect a wider trend and called to mind an office where I used to work within Aylesbury Estate in South London. The estate has long been lined up for demolition, though it still stands, and it was the backdrop to Tony Blair’s first speech as Prime Minister when he claimed he would care for the poorest in British society. A short walk from the estate, the Elephant and Castle town center was torn down for new, largely unaffordable apartment blocks and commercial units. Efforts have been made to relocate many vendors within the Latin American hub to the new commercial units, but the business is not the same. The films from the residents of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate did center on the destruction of community spaces, but standing on the graveyard of another former housing estate with a housing developer next door, the irony was not lost on me. 

Throughout the museum, wall texts attest to conversations involving the local community regarding the conception of the working museum. A few installations incorporate community response, such as inviting local residents to make ceramic tiles inspired by the Agra Colonnade. On the second floor, among the plethora of chairs in the V&A collection, is an office chair designed by local high school students, embellished with ‘#METOO,’ ‘BLM,’ and LGBTQ symbols. Since the chair was designed by high school students, I won’t fault its execution too much, except to say the use of symbols on a printed chair to indicate inclusion is unintentionally emblematic of the gesture of inclusivity in discourse throughout the museum. Only in the Robin Hood Gardens Estate exhibition does this feel accomplished, where narratives of the former estate focus on stories from the residents. 

I began to realize what my visit reminded me of. While working at a gallery years ago, I stood next to, to protect, a rug by artist Grayson Perry. The work, ‘Don’t Look Down,’ depicts a houseless man lying in his sleeping bag with his dog nearby and an array of objects spewed around him, mostly partially consumed food and beverages, in Perry’s bright cartoonish style. Perry claims works such as this “bite[ ] the hand” that feeds him, given what his work sells for and how rich he is. Yes, maybe an incredibly rich person has bought this rug to add to their portfolio of valuable artworks, and maybe they walk on the rug and walk on the person. To materially enact a rich person trampling on a poor person does nothing to deepen critique of poverty and a growing wealth divide when only one person has a voice and the other person is objectified in artwork. 

My pervading memory since visiting the V&A East Storehouse, to speak to Hans Ulrich Obrist, is not of the physical texture of the concrete or aesthetics of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate but of the stories from the residents. I returned to the museum two months after my first visit to review the films in their entirety. One of the videos I had missed on first viewing shows residents responding to the premise of the V&A East Storehouse. One person asks, “How do we objectify relics, symbols, architecture?” The collection at the museum prompts this question upon the first steps above the Agra Colonnade. The museum’s curators and directors, unclear on how to address these questions, lean instead on oft-stated community involvement as a resolution, but community involvement rarely scratches the surface of what to do with looted objects. It sidesteps responsibility entirely. Only with the Robin Hood Gardens Estate, where the people who the building served are still alive to share their experiences, is it possible for visitors to see beyond just the aesthetics of the facade. And still, its facade is rife with controversies and contention.

Despite the open shelving and artefacts being within physical touch, the V&A Storehouse doesn’t provide all the access it promises. The museum doesn’t quite know how to wrestle with its archive, and nor do the viewers. Meandering around the site, I felt tangled in the murkiness of it all. 

At the end of the Weston Collection Hall, visitors are invited to fill out sheets with their thoughts on the collection, as part of the working museum component, and thereafter attach it to the wall for others to see. One sarcastically read, “MORE CHESTS!”