The Mute Shall Speak Private View and Exhibition

About

After being shown for the first time in July 2025, The Mute Shall Speak returns as a solo exhibition at Photobook Cafe. The exhibition examines body, object, and architecture through Beck’s sustained presence within a site fallen into disrepair.

From 2020 - 2026 Tom Beck co-inhabited the Royal Throat Nose and Ear Hospital in Kings Cross, London, with over a hundred others in what is the largest guardianship scheme in Europe. For the past decade, temporary accommodation has increased as more buildings fall into disuse and rent prices rise.

The Mute Shall Speak showcases Beck’s expanded practice within the maze-like structure of the hospital. It reflects his connection to the building that housed him and his evolving relationship with photography. In this exhibition, indexical and topographic approaches give rise to uncanny and otherworldly outcomes. Blending the factual and the felt, the witnessed and the participatory, this body of work maps presence, memory, and transformation.

The Deaf Shall Hear (2022–24) forms a foundation into Beck’s engagement with the site. The series documents temporary sculptures made from found and reclaimed materials placed throughout the hospital, establishing a dialogue between object, architecture and the imagined. Formal composition contrasts with the fragility of the sculptures, generating a quiet tension between order and collapse. 

Recent works, Stairwell (2025) and Frottage (2025-26), mark a turn toward direct observation and bodily reaction to the building. Stairwell focuses on a staircase where light filters through stained glass creating zones of contemplation. In this liminal space, Beck turns the camera on himself and the scars of the dilapidated walls that surround him, drawing parallels between architecture and bodily form. Frottage is made of canvas works cut to the artist’s height that are then used to record a montage of graphite rubbings across a variety of areas in the hospital. The subtle blending of surfaces continues the theme of interrupting dormancy and opens a portal into the psychoarchitecture of the space. 

A sustained attention to gentrification and the closure of public space underpins these years of work. The Mute Shall Speak considers what value a building might hold beyond its intended function, at a moment when redevelopment is treated as unavoidable. The exhibition is both a record and a defiance.

P.V Performance: In response to this exhibition, sound recordists and engineers Nick Clapham and Billy Pleasant will be mixing and distorting recordings made of the hospital by Clapham in 2023. Layering long-wave atmos tracks with live performance, an immersive soundscape will unravel in the underground space of the gallery. This will question what sensation of the hospital is retained and what arises that’s new in this removed site.