Some commissions begin with a physical place. Others begin with an artist. A few begin with a problem so large that no single object can contain it, and the only way to approach it is through a long process of conversation, testing, and trust.
Towards a Civic Museum, the stained-glass commission by Tania Bruguera for V&A East, belongs to the latter. Installed at the threshold of the museum as it opens in East London, the work is not simply an artwork placed within a new building. It is a proposition addressed to an institution still becoming. It asks what it means for a museum to arrive in a place already shaped by layered histories, migration, inequality, aspiration and civic life, and what forms of responsibility must be built into the museum from the start if it is to be accountable to the people around it.
To understand the full significance of the piece, it is necessary to begin before the glass, before the fabrication, before the final design. It begins with the historical weight of the V&A itself.
From South Kensington to East London
The V&A was founded in South Kensington in the nineteenth century, within a wider Victorian project of design education, public instruction and industrial improvement. That civic mission was inseparable from the political and extractive realities of empire, where collecting and display helped produce a particular idea of public knowledge and national identity.
That history matters when thinking about V&A East. A new museum opening in East London cannot simply inherit that legacy unchanged. East London is not a blank space waiting to be improved by culture, but a place shaped by plurality, labour, diasporic histories and uneven development. To open a museum here is not to extend the V&A geographically, but to ask whether it can be remade in relation to this context: in what it shows, how it understands its public, and how it defines its obligations.
This question sits at the centre of Tania Bruguera’s practice. Her work has consistently tested how art operates within political and institutional structures, exploring how publics are constituted and how civic agency might be activated. Rather than producing an object for the building, she returned to a prior question: what kind of institution is arriving here, and what should it be answerable to?
A civic museum as proposition
The title Towards a Civic Museum signals a task that remains open and is yet to come. It suggests an unfinished process, a direction of travel.
Bruguera approached the project as a form of pre-emptive institutional critique before its authority hardens into routine. The work emerged through conversations about how the museum might “land” in East London, what it might offer, and what it might risk.
Alongside hopes for visibility, relevance and opportunity, there were concerns about exclusion, tokenism and whether institutional values would remain rhetorical rather than operational. A civic museum, in this context, could not be reduced to outreach or representation. It required a more demanding proposition: a museum that recognises local knowledge as expertise, remains accountable beyond its walls, and understands its legacy through the relationships it sustains.
From this process emerged the idea of a moral contract: a set of shared principles articulated before the museum opened, establishing the terms under which it might be held to account.
The Youth Collective as co-authors
If the museum was being asked to rethink its public life, the work could not be authored by the artist alone. It needed to be built through conversation with those for whom the institution was not an abstract proposition but a local reality.
The V&A East Youth Collective became central to the process. The group’s role was not consultative in the shallow sense often used by institutions, where feedback is gathered to validate a pre-existing direction. Their early conversations with Tania helped establish the critical questions and concerns that would shape the commission’s direction. This built on earlier collaboration through Common Manifesto, co-produced with members of the Youth Collective as part of the pre-opening programme.
As the project developed, this work was carried forward with members of the Youth Collective Community, who continued the process through a sustained series of workshops and discussions. Their involvement shaped the commission from the inside. Through close reading of the museum’s ambitions, they developed the contract text, challenged assumptions and grounded the work in lived realities.
These conversations moved between aspiration and constraint. They addressed what a museum can and cannot do, while insisting that institutional limits should not preclude accountability. Themes that emerged repeatedly included transparency, advocacy, generosity, sustainability, collaboration and the need to design with communities rather than for them.
A love letter to East London
What took shape was not a list of values, but a contract that could live publicly inside the museum and hold it to account over time:
We want V&A East to be more than a destination. We want a civic museum.
Where transparency, advocacy, generosity, equity, accountability, sustainability and collaboration are not empty slogans, but the way we exist within the institution.
A civic museum does not only resemble the community, but belongs to the community.
It does not speak in the name of others. It gives the floor to those who live outside its walls.
A civic museum recognises local knowledge as expertise and gives credit for its use.
A civic museum is interested not only in our production of knowledge, but provides meaningful opportunities to drive and care about our conditions of life.
A civic museum resists urban displacement and alienation.
A civic museum prioritises people over investments.
In a civic museum, each member of the community is accepted in all their complex uniqueness and intersectional identities, never forced into a generic group.
A civic museum designs its programmes with the community instead of for the community.
A civic museum re-examines itself, questions its own goals and remains accountable over time.
A civic museum is not here to save anyone, but it is a place where everyone feels safe.
This is the museum we are ready to build together, because the true legacy of V&A East will be the impact it has on the local community.
Stained-glass
Once the contract emerged, the question became how to materialise it.
The choice of stained glass was deliberate. Historically associated with authority, storytelling and moral instruction, stained glass has been used to communicate values within civic and religious spaces. Bruguera’s move was to use that authoritative medium against itself.
Rather than stabilising institutional power, the work stages fragility, transparency and accountability. It asks how a material associated with permanence can hold values that remain contingent and open to challenge.
The work is activated by light. Facing west, it shifts throughout the day: casting colour into the interior during daylight and projecting outward at night. This reversal is central. The work is not only encountered by visitors entering the museum; it is also visible from outside, making the institution’s commitments publicly legible.
Glass was also chosen for its vulnerability. Unlike a plaque, which suggests permanence and certainty, glass registers risk. It requires care. It can break. This fragility becomes part of the work’s conceptual structure, a reminder that institutional promises are not fixed, but must be maintained.
From concept to fabrication
If Bruguera anchored the conceptual framework, stained-glass artist Richard Paton realised its material form.
Working with the medium for over three decades, Paton combines traditional techniques with contemporary adaptation. His process required translating the conceptual composition into a precise system of panels, lead lines and painted elements. Each decision had to be fixed in advance; unlike other media, stained glass does not allow late improvisation without significant consequences. The fabrication process involved site measurements, full-scale drawings and iterative adjustments, balancing artistic intent with material constraints. This negotiation between concept and craft became a key dynamic within the commission.
A co-produced composition
The final composition is structured around a map of East London. The River Thames and River Lea provide orientation, while roads become connective lines across the surface. A large floral motif marks the museum’s location.
William Morris was a key point of departure here. As an East London figure and one of the foundational visual references of the V&A’s South Kensington legacy, Morris offered a bridge between the nineteenth-century museum and its contemporary reinvention. But Bruguera did not want simply to quote Morris. She wanted to stretch his floral language through other cultural traditions in order to reflect the layered realities of East London today.
The flowers therefore draw not only from Arts and Crafts references, but also from wider textile and decorative languages associated with Persian, South Asian, Easter European, Western African, Latin American, and other diasporic contexts. The point is not ethnographic exactitude, but visual plurality: East London as a place where many worlds live at once.
The fox, retained after discussion with the Youth Collective, introduces another register. It is at once local and disruptive, a familiar East London presence that refuses to let the work settle into pure allegory. The fox is rendered using silver stain and paint, linking ancient stained-glass processes to the contemporary urban image.
At the base of the work, seed-like forms contain the names of contributors[1]. These are not decorative additions, but markers of authorship. They make visible that the work is co-produced and that its values emerge from specific voices rather than an abstract “community.”
The text itself is structurally embedded. Standard lead was widened to accommodate engraving, allowing the contract to be cut directly into the lines that hold the composition together. The museum’s commitments are therefore not applied to the work; they are integral to its construction.
You cannot step into the same river twice
Facing west, the glass catches the lowering sun and changes through the day. At sunset, the blues intensify and the glass throws coloured light into the museum. At night, the internal lighting makes the piece visible to the outside. It is therefore never the same work twice. This temporal quality is vital. Towards a Civic Museum is not a fixed proclamation. It is a changing proposition, legible only through repeated return.
The work proposes a paradigm shift: from museum as transmitter to museum as listener, from representation to accountability, from a paternalistic logic of cultural improvement to a civic logic of relation.
Fifty years from now, if someone stands in front of this work and asks what kind of museum was trying to come into being in East London in the 2020s, the answer will not lie only in the contract text. It will lie in the fact that this question was asked at all, and asked publicly, in light, before the institution had fully settled into itself.
[1] Ruwaydah Abidali, Hanifah Anam, Tania Bruguera, Gus Casely-Hayford, Dani Chamorro, Valentina Hernández Castrillón, Ceylan Ismail, Maya Lewis, Serra Luthena, Lucy Mcveigh, Shai Mitchell, Shaquan Nurse, Richard Paton, Rubén Salgado Pérez, Nafhat Sharif, Iguette Tchecko, and Talia Woodin.
