Empire’s Steel Skeleton: Dissecting the New V&A East Storehouse

By Avin Houro

Encased within East London’s post-industrial landscape, amidst the synthetic glow of Stratford’s ever-rising skyline, far from the terracotta façades and Victorian grandeur of South Kensington, the new Victoria and Albert Museum East Storehouse offers the promise of historical transparency and accessibility. The Storehouse exposes more than 250,000 objects across its sprawling four-storey facility, a museological circuit board cladded with possibility.

Yet, this is the V&A. Currents of doubt buzz around its steel structure about whether these new approaches to visibility truly unsettle how these objects are understood. The question remains: has the colonial skeleton of the museum been shaken, or simply re-dressed? 

Since its opening in May 2025, the V&A East Storehouse has been awash with applause. Hailed for its treasure trove-esque character, lauded as a model for ‘museum of the future,’ it was even canonised by TikTokers as the latest cultural pilgrimage. Yet, beneath this wave of acclaim lies genuine merit marking those slow tremors of transformation. Museums are no longer merely spaces for exhibiting finished artefacts but are instead shifting to display hidden choreographies of the institution itself. 

The modern museums of the 18th and 19th centuries were underpinned by the transference of objects from private collections into public hands. The Storehouse takes this a step further, uncovering conservators at work and offering a privileged bird’s-eye viewpoint into the delicate anatomies of preservation. Explanatory videos demystify these processes, and wall labels direct attention beyond the object itself, towards the intricate pathways through which they have been restored, catalogued and eventually displayed. The Storehouse opens up not just its collections, but the processes that sustain it and give the objects their institutional afterlives. Entry is finally granted into once-guarded and specialist domains.

The Storehouse’s sheer breadth of displays, spanning centuries and continents, from Ottoman sapphire tiles to noughties Glastonbury neon-painted bins, floods the space with wonder, drawing visitors into a historical tapestry of material culture. Moments of immersive encounter further transform the industrial expanse, offering fleeting moments of escape. An entire 15th-century Spanish palace ceiling hangs overhead. Full intimate interiors, from 1920s German kitchens to 1930s American offices, are meticulously reconstructed. Even a vast floor-to-ceiling draped Picasso engulfs the room (Le Train Bleu, 1924). It is clear that the Storehouse revels in these collisions of time and texture, but doing so does blur the lines between storage and stage. The result: a blinding spectacle that dims a criticality necessary to truly reckon with the Storehouse as an extension of the V&A museum.

Museums are not neutral shelters for objects and certainly are not passive containers of cultural memory. They are ideological instruments—structures that transform possession into pedagogy, then claim the authority of objective knowledge. The curator, far from a mere custodian, is a storyteller; and the museum, as an institution, functions as what Edward Said would call an ‘Occidental’ machine: a Western apparatus for producing and ordering meaning, mapping knowledge according to Eurocentric frameworks. Within this context Gottfried Semper, the architect and social reformer behind the original V&A building, declared that ‘museums are true teachers of a free people.’ Yet such a claim sits uneasily when viewed through the museum’s own genealogy: a history forged in the crucible of imperial expansion, stocked with plunder, and dedicated to narrating Britain’s place at the centre of a global empire. 

The V&A, like many of its 19th-century peers, was conceived as a centre of enlightenment and education, a repository of world culture made accessible to the metropolitan public. But as the imperial underpinnings of such collections come into sharper focus, that legacy becomes an obstacle to their reimagination as equitable spaces of knowledge. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 proved to be a moment widely recognised as a turning point, or ‘a new reckoning’ as museum adviser András Szántó puts it, for how museums approach and interpret their collections. Its impact: politics now publicly intersects with museums at an unavoidable intensity, igniting surges of institutional introspection and calls for accountability. And so, the authority once vested in museum walls now casts shadows that cannot be lifted without confronting the material violence through which these collections were assembled. 

It is through these shadows that the V&A East Storehouse emerges: a new structure innovatively attempting to reimagine the museum’s relationship with the past, a rare opportunity to look inwards as well as backwards. Though much like its engine room in South Kensington, it rejects this reckoning, ensuring instead that the Storehouse becomes not a rupture, but an annexe, built upon the same imperial foundations. Its transparency, therefore, becomes an aesthetic rather than an ethic, providing a performance of access that reveals without truly unsettling.

The Storehouse bought into a tried and tested strategy: recruiting contemporary artists to diversify and reanimate its collection. This curatorial move aligns neatly with a growing institutional appetite for ‘subjective historiographies’ authored by artists mining contested archives to draw out institutional silences. In theory, such collaborations promise a more malleable and heuristic museum, one that folds together shifting methodologies, social contexts, and new forms of visual inquiry. 

Yet, in practice, this gesture feels less like confrontation and more like compensation. The Storehouse’s heavy reliance on artistic and participatory interventions amounts to a symbolic outsourcing of decolonial labour, displacing responsibility for reckoning with empire onto artists and audiences alike. A screen in Gallery 1 projects a dance film by Akademi, the UK’s leading South Asian dance organisation, reimagining the architectural legacy of the Agra Colonnade, one of the museum’s colonial fragments. Meanwhile, the V&A East Youth Collective, composed of ‘young East Londoners who want to inform change’, was enlisted to respond to parts of the exhibition. Both gestures, however well-meaning, feel more like curatorial camouflage than critical engagement—an attempt to choreograph dialogue when structural accountability is still absent and colonial legacies are left unacknowledged. Decolonisation is deeper than just representation.

Its architecture and ethos remain firmly rooted within the British Empire’s enduring web, and so any attempt at symbolic redress can never go far enough; to do so would require confronting its own foundations, and that is too risky. This tension surfaces repeatedly across the Storehouse. A display case of Palestinian tatreez is accompanied by the caption: ‘The V&A first collected Palestinian garments in 1910 and we are actively expanding and diversifying the collection today.’ Yet to frame these embroideries merely as part of the V&A’s expanding archive is to neutralise their political and historical gravity. In the present climate, to exhibit Palestinian material culture without contextualising its colonial dispossession or ongoing erasure risks transforming cultural preservation into aesthetic containment. 

This dynamic becomes even clearer in in Violent Delights: An Enslaver’s Collection, displayed with the accompanying text:

‘Simply ornate objects? An enslaver we choose not to name drew his fortune out of forced labour and used this wealth to build his collection. Countless backs were broken, but the violence behind these objects remains invisible if we memorialise this enslaver who saw human beings as assets. Instead, we want to remember the hundreds of women, men and children who were forced to labour on his sugar plantations in Jamaica and suffered for the sake of his “taste”.’

At first glance, the label appears conscientious, foregrounding the victims rather than the enslaver. However, this logic of anonymity paradoxically erases both sides: there is no exposure of the enslaver’s actions, nor of the thousands of individuals subjected to forced labour, instead reduced to a generalised abstraction. The authoritative voice of the museum persists, controlling unilaterally what information viewers are permitted to access and how they are allowed to understand it. Because the V&A has positioned itself as a superior entity, an epistemological custodian of ethical understanding, the label is not a neutral explanation. It is an assertion of institutional power, shaping the audience’s perception while maintaining distance from the very violence it purports to confront. 

These custodian duties extend beyond the language of the labels. Many of the objects on display in the Storehouse lack traditional labels, relying instead on QR codes directing visitors to the online catalogue for contextual information. While presenting a façade of innovation, embedding prerequisite technology into the museum experience, the effort required to access the information means that countless objects’ histories remain unexamined. In practice, this risks further concealing the origins and contested lives of the very artefacts the museum claims to make visible.

The museum’s gesture toward inclusivity thus becomes another form of control; history is acknowledged only insofar as it can be safely archived. The same logic pervades the very entrance of the Storehouse, where bookcases stacked with anti-colonial literature, with classics including Fanon and Said, gestures superficially toward institutional reflexivity, but never moves beyond appearance.

The words of Ariella Azoulay are highly pertinent here: ‘for these institutions to be transformed or reformed… looting [must] be acknowledged as their infrastructure.’ Without such recognition, museums like the V&A East Storehouse risk endlessly replicating imperial forms beneath the guise of reinvention. True transformation demands more than architectural transparency or participatory veneers; it requires a reconfiguration of the very epistemic structures that underpin the institution. Only by unpicking its foundations can a colonial museum become a space for postcolonial discourse: one that reclaims and rethinks the histories and agencies of those once subordinated through the lens of their own holdings. 

Such charged collections, as Derrida once proposed, hold the latent potential to become sites of ‘critical resistance’ if their custodians are willing to confront rather than curate their contradictions. Remediating the ethno-colonial museum therefore calls for a surgical process—one that cuts deep into the conditions of institutional blindness, rather than masking it with aesthetic reform. As Ann Laura Stoler reminds us, ‘colonial presence’ operates through a ‘political grammar’ that hides and occludes. The task, then, is to break this grammar open—to reimagine the museum not merely as a ‘storehouse’ of empire, but as a site of rupture, responsibility, and resistance. 

AVIN HOURO is a recent Global and Imperial History MSt graduate from the University of Oxford. She is interested in the intersections between art, memory, and colonial history.

Photo by Avin Houro