Text by Ana Escoto

View of the V&A East Storehouse, 2025. Image courtesy of the author.

It has been a long time since an art institution has blown me away. I’ve been part of the art world for the last decade of my life. This has made me cynical, dubious, almost unimpressionable. I might think an exhibition is good, but then I move on to the next, and I have no recollection of what I’ve previously seen. 

I’m constantly in a state of being over-saturated and exhausted. It can often feel like I have to scrape the bottom of the barrel at an art fair to find something with meaning. The state of art today is somehow intangible and unintelligible. Few things work, and even fewer objects feel ensouled.

I was not expecting this notion to be swayed when I entered the new V&A East Storehouse. Although I’d heard it was an architectural marvel and a testament to the V&A’s legacy as an institution furthering the conservation and investigation of art, I did not expect it to feel like a Warburgian Atlas Mnemosyne come to life.

Aby Warburg, a fellow art historian whose work is borderline esoteric, developed throughout the duration of his life, a visual mapping of symbols and signs that transcend time and space. By pinning thousands of images from history books, encyclopedias (anything he could get his hands on), Warburg tangled a web of universal consciousness turned image. This atlas reminds us that each symbol we know and use today carries an ancestral legacy, holding within it a sonnet of previous cultures and understandings that inevitably resurface and replicate infinitely.

This is exactly what I felt at the Storehouse: each object, complex in its singularity, became something entirely new when placed beside another, often unrelated, object. They enter into conversation, echoing universal symbols that stand as vestiges of our shared human imprint across time.

I walked cautiously, trying not to trip from the vertigo induced by the hatches on the metal grid floor that let you see all the way down towards the basement. I tried to keep my eyesight in line with the first shelves of objects, trying not to think about what would happen if the ground beneath me buckled. I was concentrating on this (palms sweating, heart drumming, which I must admit only added adrenaline to the whole experience), when I came across a marble torno. I looked it up on the Storehouse website, which included all the labels not visible in the museum, and sure enough, that delicate Virgin Mary’s face had been carved by none other than Donatello. However, this sumptuous sculpture was adjacent to an Egyptian fragment of a stone hand, attributed to an unknown maker, dating from the 4th century. Further down that second level, next to the Robin Hood Council House façade that was rescued from its 2024 demolition was a ceramic plate with the Virgin of Guadalupe from Mexico that had belonged to one of the old owners of one of the council flats.

This type of decontextualisation, of loosely relating objects together, worked so well for me. There were no hierarchies, no geographical or material distinctions. Everything was placed with the same care, which made nothing stand out in a delicious way. There have been many attempts to achieve exactly this. Famously, the 2019 MoMA rehang, which led the de-chronological movement in the art world which attempted to renounce artistic hierarchies, opting for more abstract connectors. The Tate Modern followed this example by turning its permanent collection into more abstract divisions: “Material Gestures”, “Poetry and Dream”, “Idea and Object”, and so on.

But these attempts at deconstructing hierarchies and chronology fail at their core. Re-arranging an already star-studded room, one that allows little to no real mobility, under the guise of equality feels forced. There’s no sense that any of it comes from a place of genuine radicalism. If it did, we’d see unknown artists from all cultural backgrounds, not simply positioned in contrast to the artists we already know (cue MoMA’s Picasso room, with masks from the African continent interposed with his paintings to showcase what influenced him), but included because they deserve our attention and equal treatment.

Displaying the façade of the Robin Hood council housing inside an institution re-contextualised it completely and pointed that mundane structures like these deserve to be preserved and admired. I touched the railing, likely touched by thousands of others who had spent time on that balcony: talking to neighbours, strangers, passing time. The art object is the only form that allows for this kind of intimacy. The Storehouse brings you into close proximity with lived-in objects and spaces that are so often overlooked. They sit in quiet dialogue with works by Da Vinci and Gainsborough, without missing a beat, and without needing justification.

The V&A achieves something I’d almost given up on in today’s climate: it treats art as a serious, vital practice. The glimpse into the conservation section of the Storehouse only deepened this sense. Not because art needs to masquerade as science to be taken seriously, but because, for too long, it’s been dismissed as irrelevant to the thread of our reality. 

If I had a pence for every time I’ve been ridiculed for studying art for 4+ year by a finance bro wearing an ill-fitting suit, I’d have like £0.15 lol. Without us studying art, conducting extensive research, understanding its signs and symbols, what would be the remnants of our existence for later study? Who would preserve the legacy of culture and humanity, if not the people who dedicate their lives to understanding it?