Exhibition
Space Popular: The Portal Galleries
29 Jun 2022 – 25 Sep 2022
Regular hours
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 17:00
Free admission
Address
- 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields
- London
- WC2A
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Short walk from Holborn Tube Station on the Central Line
Multidisciplinary design duo Space Popular invite visitors to experience the magic and mechanics of virtual travel in an exhibition that bridges the technologies of Soane’s time and ours.
About
The exhibition responds to the virtuality of Sir John Soane’s Museum by focusing on ‘the portal’: a door or threshold that grants entrance into another environment, whether physical or virtual.
Using Sir John Soane’s Museum as the point from which to begin a multidimensional journey, Space Popular – led by designers Lara Lesmes and Frederik Hellberg – present their research on the portal through time and across media.
The desire to travel virtually across time, space and realms has been a recurring theme in the collective imagination – one that many have explored through fictional narratives.
At the root of this exhibition is a database of extensive research, built by Space Popular, charting the development and function of portals in fiction from the 1950s through to the present day. To help organise their research, they developed eighteen distinct categories of portal, each with shared characteristics: namely, Ring Gate, Energy Frame, Portable Hole, Crack, Beam, Bridge, Vehicle, Pavilion, Furniture, Tree, Hole, Object, Monolith, Wall, Door, Floating Door, Chalk Door, Water, and Mirror.