The RCA at Great Exhibition Road Festival 2025

Quantum art (feat. Prof Johnny Golding)

Saturday 7 June, 3–3.55pm

V&A Lecture Theatre (Lydia Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre)

Explore how artists and scientists have been inspired by the weird and wonderful quantum realm

2025 is the UNESCO International Year of Quantum, marking a century since theories for a new area of physics transformed how we describe nature’s behaviour below the atomic scale.

In the time since the quantum revolution has forced scientists and engineers to rethink how the cosmos works at its most fundamental level, question the validity of how we experience reality in our daily lives, and develop new technologies and ways of probing the fabric of the universe. However, it has not just provided scientific revelations. Bringing the quantum realm to life has also inspired creatives and artists, challenging them to rethink their practice, how they make art, and what types of stories their art can tell.

At this year’s Great Exhibition Road Festival hear from a unique panel of quantum physicists and quantum-loving artists. Together they will discuss what makes quantum uniquely inspiring, how their two disciplines have attempted to conceptualise, visualise and communicate the quantum reality, and how the imagery and language of quantum went mainstream and came to have the influence on art and culture that it did.

Dr Harold Offeh: Art on the psychiatric ward

Sunday 8 June, 1.30–2.15pm

V&A Lecture Theatre (Lydia Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre)

Experience a performance and discussion of Harold Offeh’s work with psychiatric wards, aiming to bring colour, culture and art to these clinical surroundings

In 2019 artist and Royal College of Art tutor Harold Offeh was commissioned by Hospital Rooms, the arts and mental health charity, to work with service users from the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit at Bethlem Royal Hospital, to bring art to these clinical settings. Offeh describes the resulting collaboration as “paying focused attention to the overwhelming possibilities of our external environment.”

The participants mapped their experience of their immediate surroundings through detailed rubbings of the architectural surfaces. These were then incorporated into dizzying lenticular patterns by Offeh, who later combined them with audio pieces sampling jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie and readings exploring mindfulness - the mental process of paying attention to the present moment which is often used to reduce stress and anxiety.

At the Great Exhibition Road Festival Offeh will bring this project to the V&A stage. Part audio-visual performance- part discussion of Offeh’s practice and inspiration, it promises to be a fascinating exploration of how art can transform any space and the perspectives of people that reside within it.

Building memories

Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 June, 12–6pm

Exhibition Road

Help create a ‘mosaic of hope’ for future generations through wax rubbings, self-reflection, polaroid photography and sensory interactions with one of the most famous buildings on Exhibition Road

The Royal College of Arts’ Carmen Mariscal is interested in the physical and emotional connection between people and the cities that contain them. At the Great Exhibition Road Festival attendees will engage with the scarring and pockmarks of famous Vicotria and Albert Museum, scars that were left visible to keep the memory of wartime destruction alive for future generations. By create waxing rubbings and using them to decorate messages of hope for future generations, Carmen hopes the experience will get festival attendees of all ages back in touch with their sense of touch, remind visitors of their emotional connections to the built environment, and see them reflect on ways that we can care for each other, and for our buildings. Together these reflections, alongside polaroid photography capturing moments of sensory interaction with Victorian-aged Museum walls, will build over the Festival weekend into ‘mosaic of hope’ for future generations.
Carmen Mariscal is a practice-based doctoral candidate at the Royal College of Art, London. Her cross-disciplinary practice explores traces of memory in dwellings. These include the body, which is humans´ first habitat, followed by their clothes, homes, public spaces, and cities. Her recent research also investigates entropy and ruin in architecture. These themes are expressed through photography, sculpture, sound, moving image, theatre set design, and installation.

Open Sesame Redux

Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 June, 12–6pm

Beit Quad, Prince Consort Road, Imperial College London

Can you outwit thieves in a game of poisoned chalice? Stick your hand in a pit of vipers? Crack Ali Baba’s code? Can you Open Sesame? Join us in unlocking the treasures.
Experimental theatre design meets escape room in this treasure hunt playfully exploring the errors of our past. Sorting through the sights, sounds, and smells in the transformed Union Bar, friends and strangers alike, discover the future of collaborative storytelling through connective puzzle-solving.

Play and connect as we muse on what the cost of magic words like “Open Sesame” actually is. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves is one of the most well-known of Shehrezad’s stories from One Thousand and One Nights and Ali Baba’s secret phrase “Open Sesame” has become infamous in the English-speaking world. But untethered from their source and fraught with inaccuracies, interpretations changing as often as the desert sand, a new treasure trove stands to be unlocked in this year’s Great Exhibition Road Festival.
We invite you and your friends to join us in trying your hand at unlocking the treasures of yore and maybe learn something along the way. Knowledge has a price...
This activity is developed and delivered by students from the Royal College of Art. You are welcome to join individually, enlist strangers, or join as a group.

Radioactive Holidays by Grupo H

Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 June, 12–6pm

Beit Quad, Prince Consort Road, Imperial College London

This interactive installation invites you to experience familiar landscapes through the invisible legacies of radioactive contamination.

‘Radioactive Holidays’ will immerse you in the haunted landscapes of Andalusia’s eastern coast. While millions of tourists have turned Andalusia into the UK’s top holiday destination, few know that this coastline carries the unresolved legacies of one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. In 1966, a US bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons crashed over farmland in the province of Almería. Authorities secretly buried much of the radioactive fallout, yet the landscape retained the memory. For decades, scientists have traced the spectral presence of plutonium, relying not only on technoscientific sensors but also on plants, soils, humans, and other animals, which have functioned as living archives of toxicity.

In this activity, you will be able to take part in a collective publishing project that reassembles the multimedia traces of environmental disaster. You will learn about different modes of sensing, discovering how landscapes remember, how histories linger, and how sensory alliances can expand our perception of seemingly familiar places.