Touching on themes of countercultures and subcultures, ‘Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins’ at the Barbican Art Centre featured work by photographers from the 1950s to the present day which followed the lives of individuals and communities on society’s fringes. Creating spaces for their stories, CMK’s exhibition design involved the insertion of seven galleries in varied sizes and proportions to provide unique settings to showcase seven artists in a series of connected but distinct, enclosed spaces.

Built in black valchromat with varied textural finishes on the walls, each gallery had its own character and apertures. The sequential nature of the plan typology was woven together by a continuous path into a constellation of rich spatial experiences, with the design providing different viewing environments. Deliberately inserted thresholds and liminal spaces between the galleries produced interruptions in this spatial flow, providing room for pauses for thought on the subject matter.