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Open City Audio

Weekly programmes by Open City. Making architecture and cities more open, accessible and equitable. This week: Deconstructed. Leighton House - Art and Orientalism. In this episode Matthew Lloyd Roberts is joined by Hannah Lund, Curator of Exhibitions and Displays at Leighton House and Sambourne House. Leighton House was the Kensington home and studio of Victorian artist and president of the Royal Academy, Frederic Leighton. Fascinated by the material culture of the Islamic world, he created his ‘Arab Hall’, tiling a domed extension to his house with West Asian ceramics gathered on a trip to Damascus. We discuss Leighton House, Victorian interest in Arabian culture, and the new curatorial interventions being made this year to mark the centenary of the house as a public museum run by the local authority, with new commissions from artists which query the meaning of such spaces their original context and to us today. [Repeats Tuesday 2.30am.]

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