Curatorial Rationale
As part of their year-long programme at James Stirling’s No.1 Poultry, Hypha Studios presents a series of select exhibitions engaging with architecture and the built environment, organised in collaboration with art and architecture platform recessed.space.
Their latest exhibition What lasts doesn’t always hold shape asks what it means to endure when change is the only constant. Curated by Taylor Hall and Rebecca Jak, it brings together works by Marian Drew, Levent Ozruh, and Jobe Burns.
Drew, Ozruh and Burns respond directly to No. 1 Poultry by engaging with the physical and symbolic life of the stone that envelops the building’s façade. Long associated with endurance, stone is reframed as a witness to deep time and a reflection of human fragility, intervention, ideology and cultural projection. Its capacity to endure is not treated as a result of its tough, unmovable materiality, but as the product of care, adaptation and interaction. Across the exhibition, each artist resists stasis in favour of open-endedness, employing materiality as a co-collaborator to reveal what lasts as something continually shaped, negotiated and re-authored.
Drawing on their shared backgrounds in art and architectural culture, Jak and Hall’s co-curatorial practice is rooted in reciprocity and knowledge-sharing across disciplines. They approach materiality as an act of empathy, view the climate crisis through the lens of culture, and understand time as a tangible accumulation that settles within things, places, and spaces. This perspective is brought into dialogue with the layered histories of No.1 Poultry, a site built and rebuilt over nearly two millennia.
Constructed after Stirling’s death amid significant archaeological discoveries of early Londinium, No.1 Poultry sits within a dense web of spatial inheritance. The street’s name recalls a market industry displaced as early as the 16th century, while Stirling’s fascination with history, fragmentation, and reassembly offers a critical reference point within a city where buildings are increasingly designed to perform rather than endure.
What lasts doesn’t always hold shape reflects on a site defined by continuous transformation. Romans, Victorians, and Stirling alike could not have anticipated its present use, but perhaps that is the point: what lasts is not what holds its shape, but what continues to fit into the human story.
