For V&A East’s New Work programme of commissions, artist Tania Bruguera has created Towards a Civic Museum, a stained glass work installed at the threshold of V&A East Museum.
Developed with young people from East London and realised in collaboration with Rainbow Glass Studio, the work takes the form of a “moral contract” between the museum and its publics. Combining text, light, mapping and floral motifs, the commission asks what it means for a cultural institution to arrive in a place already shaped by complex histories, communities and futures.
In this interview, Bruguera discusses how the work emerged through dialogue with the V&A East Youth Collective and Youth Collective Community, why she chose stained glass for the first time, and how the commission reflects on accountability, authorship and the possibility of a civic museum.
Can you tell us about the title Towards a Civic Museum and what you wanted it to open up?
The title came directly from the experience of working with young people from East London. From the beginning, the question was not only what the museum is, but what it does when it arrives somewhere.
Every institution arrives with promises. It creates attention, expectations, visibility. But once that happens, other things begin to move too. Land values shift, narratives are formed, people start imagining different futures. Some of those things can be positive, but they are not neutral, and they are not always within the control of the institution.
The young people were very aware of this. They wanted the museum to know who they were, and to understand what its presence might mean in their lives, not only now but ten or fifteen years from now, when the effects of its arrival will be more fully felt.
So the work does not begin from celebration. It begins from anticipation. It asks what responsibilities a museum takes on before it becomes settled, before its habits become fixed, and before its values become only words.
What does the idea of a civic museum mean to you?
For me, a civic museum is not a museum that speaks for a community. It is a museum that belongs in relation to that community.
At one point in the process, I felt the museum was carrying too much hope. There was a feeling that it might solve everything. But of course it cannot. It is still a museum. It cannot build housing. It cannot undo structural inequality. It cannot repair every problem around it.
But it can decide how accountable it wants to be.
That distinction became important. A civic museum is not a place where everyone simply shows their work. It is a place where what is shown matters to the people who live around it. It recognises that local knowledge is expertise. It understands that art is not separate from civic life, but part of it.
So the question becomes how does the museum live with others? How does it remain useful? How does it remain answerable?
You were cautious about the project at the beginning. Why was that?
I was very cautious. I did not want to be used as a name, and I did not want the community to be instrumentalised.
There is always a risk with participation that it becomes theatre, like symbolic involvement without real consequence. A community is invited in, people are asked to contribute, but the structure of the institution does not really change. I was worried about that.
But after a year of engagement, and after seeing how invested the young people were, how much time and thought they were giving to the future of the institution, I realised there was something genuine happening. They were not being asked simply to approve something that already existed. They were asking difficult questions. They were thinking seriously about what this museum could become.
That is when it became clear to me that the work could not be decorative. It had to be structural. It had to enter the building as a proposition.
The work takes the form of a stained glass commission. What drew you to that material?
The choice surprised me as well, because I had never worked with stained glass before.
Stained glass carries authority. It carries permanence. It carries moral instruction. It is a language that institutions already understand. Historically, it has been used in religious, civic and educational spaces to communicate values and beliefs. It tells people what matters.
But I wanted to turn that authority into fragility.
I could have made a plaque. Something solid, something cemented. But what we were talking about was not only a building. It was intention. And intention is fragile. It can break easily.
Glass allows light to pass through. It demands transparency. It can also shatter. That was important to me. The material itself carries the contradiction of the work. It has beauty and authority, but it also needs care. It is strong and vulnerable at the same time.
The work is installed at the threshold of the museum. Why was that position important?
If the work is a moral contract, then everyone who enters the museum should also be entering into it, at least metaphorically.
The threshold is where the relationship begins. Visitors encounter the work as they arrive, carrying those aspirations with them into the museum. Then they encounter it again when they leave, with the experience of the museum behind them. That return matters.
Most stained glass is intended to be read in one direction. This work insists on return. It asks to be read from inside and outside, on arrival and departure, in daylight and at night.
At night, when it is dark outside and the museum is lit from within, the relationship changes again. The work becomes visible from the outside. The text and the light move outward. That is important because the contract is not only an internal statement. It has to be visible to the public beyond the museum.
Can you talk about the contract text and how it developed?
The contract emerged from the conversations with the young people. It is not a manifesto written from above. It is a set of principles shaped through discussion, disagreement and shared responsibility.
The text speaks about transparency, advocacy, generosity, equity, accountability, sustainability and collaboration. But it was important that these did not remain abstract values. The work asks what it would mean for those values to become ways of acting within the institution.
A civic museum cannot simply resemble the community. It must belong to the community in a meaningful way. It must not speak in the name of others, but give the floor to those who live outside its walls. It must recognise local knowledge as expertise and give credit for its use. It must design with communities, not for them.
There were also more difficult conversations. Some demands were already being addressed by the museum. Others were harder to articulate publicly. That negotiation was part of the work. It was not only a contract with the community, it was also a contract with the institution.
How did working with young people from East London shape the commission?
The work came from them in a very deep way.
The young people were not only participants. They were asking what the museum would mean in their lives. They were thinking about time, about displacement, about opportunity, about how institutions make promises and whether those promises last.
They also helped shift the work away from abstraction. It is easy for institutions to use words like community, access or accountability. The young people pushed those words into reality. What does accountability look like? Who is being addressed? What happens when values are not visible? How does a museum make opportunities tangible?
Their involvement made the work sharper. It grounded it. It made it impossible for the commission to be only symbolic.
The design draws on William Morris, but also moves beyond that reference. How did that visual language develop?
Morris was important because he was connected to East London, and because of his belief that art should be part of everyday life. That felt relevant to the question of a civic museum.
But East London today is not Victorian England. It is many places at once. It is shaped by migration, by different cultures, by people who carry histories and visual languages from many parts of the world.
So the work begins with Morris’s floral language, but does not stay there. It transforms through different references such as, Persian patterns, South Asian motifs, African textiles and other visual traditions.
The design shifts as it moves across the glass, just as the neighbourhood does. It refuses a single visual language. It tries to hold plurality without collapsing it into one identity.
The work includes the names of people involved in the project, rendered as seeds. Why was that important?
That was non-negotiable for me.
Authorship matters. You should be able to see where the work comes from. If people give their time, their thoughts, their hopes and their fears to a project, that presence should not disappear into a general idea of “community”.
The names are held like seeds because they speak to growth, continuity and responsibility. They are small, but they carry the possibility of something becoming rooted over time.
For me, that was also a way of making the co-authorship visible. The work is not only by one person. It has been shaped by many people, and that should be materially present in the piece.
You have described the work as a call to action. Who is that call addressed to?
It is addressed to the institution, but not only to the institution.
A civic museum cannot exist without its audience. Visitors are not passive. They are part of what the museum becomes. The work asks them to read, to notice, to question, to remember what has been promised.
Art is not something distant or elite. It is part of emotional education. It is part of daily life. It helps people understand how they are connected to others, and how structures shape those connections.
So the question is not only what the museum displays. The question is how the museum lives with others, and how everyone who enters becomes part of that civic relationship.
You have imagined the work as something that could be revisited every five years. Can you explain that idea?
The work should not be complete forever.
Ideally, every five years the contract would be rewritten with new participants. The old glass would be replaced. After fifteen years, the three versions could be shown together as evidence. Evidence of change, or evidence of failure.
Institutions sediment over time. The first five years are unstable. By ten years, patterns are set. By fifteen years, change becomes difficult. This is a way to intervene before that hardening happens.
It does not need to be done by me. The system is the artwork.
What matters is the repetition. The museum would have to return to the question of its civic responsibility again and again. That is what makes it alive.
Does this connect to your wider thinking about institutional critique?
Yes. It is about rescuing institutional critique from spectacle.
Institutional critique is often imagined as exposure, revealing what is wrong, showing the contradiction, producing a moment of confrontation. That can be important, but I am interested here in critique as maintenance.
Critique as repetition. Critique as responsibility.
This kind of work is not expensive in terms of money. It is expensive emotionally. That is why it is hard. It asks people to remain in relationship with difficult questions over time.
But institutions should do this kind of work naturally. Art just reminds them.
What do you hope visitors take away from encountering the work?
I hope they understand that the museum is not only a destination. It is a relationship.
The true legacy of V&A East will not be the building alone. It will be the lives it chooses to be accountable to.
I hope visitors read the work and feel that they are part of that question. I hope they understand that the contract is not only a statement on the wall or in the glass. It is something that has to be lived, tested and returned to over time.
A civic museum is not something that exists because an institution declares it. It exists only through practice.
