Curators – Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard – 2026 – UK
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A chapel interior is repurposed as a reflection on how personal tragedy can awaken empathy, mercy and collective care – exhibition / installation at Fitzrovia Chapel from Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 25th
It’s a strange phenomenon when you attend an exhibition / installation and the unfamiliar venue is, to you, as exciting as the event itself. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s new outing isn’t a film, but an exhibition, the second of three they’ve created in this particular space as it turns out. And the space they’ve deployed is fabulous, a new one on me.
The Byzantine-inspired Fitzrovia Chapel, as the name implies, is situated in the heart of Fitzrovia, the area of London North of Oxford Street between Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road. It’s the chapel of the former Middlesex Hospital, one of London’s flagship NHS teaching hospitals, which was closed in 2006. You may be familiar with the chapel from King Charles’ 2024 Christmas broadcast.
The venue is open on particular days, often Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, but not every week, and opening times can vary if the space is hosting an exhibition.
What can present challenges is if, as this writer did, you attend a show without being familiar with the space as it normally appears to visitors outside of exhibitions / installations.
The current Miseris Succurrere Disco show, for instance, uses half a dozen or so seats which look like marshmallows – brought in for the show – which sit on the permanent tiled floor, integrated fully into its decor of repeating circles. The lighting renders the interior considerably more gloomy and atmospheric than it would normally be.
The overall lighting effect is to give the interior a sort of dark, golden glow from two or three high-placed light sources. This is enhanced by one of two scents by olfactive design studio Denim-Sykes which is supposed to conjure hospitals, although having come from a hospital appointment myself that day just up the road at UCH, the smell certainly didn’t feel like a modern hospital. More like something from pre-NHS history – the Victorian era, or perhaps even earlier. A second scent, discernible as you move into the chapel towards the altar, evokes petrichor – the earthy aroma of rain and renewal. This is intended to introduce a note of change, relief and human warmth.
This repurposed environment, within an enhanced acoustic environment developed in collaboration with Arup, serves as a performance space for the pre-recorded music composition Miseris Succurrere Disco by experimental vocal collective NYX, featuring six vocalists – Rhianna Compton, Sian O’Gorman, Rachel Oyawale, AK Patterson, Plumm and Helen Walpole. It loops and plays three times an hour. If people treat the piece with respect, as they did at the press opening, it focuses the interior’s properties as a meditative or contemplative space which takes you out of yourself. The music comes with a minimalist light show, or ‘light sculpture’ as the press blurb describes it; by scenographer Emmanuel Biard; at one point, you are bathed in a blinding, golden light that completely eclipses the surroundings. A transcendent moment indeed.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the piece bears some relationship to the discotheque, but it doesn’t; the Latin word disco is where we derive our English word ‘discovery’. The legend ‘miseris succurrere disco’ comes from the former Middlesex’s motto, taking its cue from Virgil’s Aeneid – Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco (“Having known misfortune myself, I am learning to help those in distress”). The exhibition / installation is intended as a reflection on how personal tragedy can awaken empathy, mercy and collective care.
Completing the exhibition / installation, situated over the font, is a small sculpture Unresurrectable Biologies: Un-Undead 1 consisting of doll’s heads inside early electric lightbulbs mounted on a Gothic candelabra-like form by artist and joint Turner Prize winner, Tai Shani. It was inspired by the Alicudi women.
While the exhibition / installation is intriguing in itself, and well worth a visit or two, it also made me want to return to the Fitzrovia Chapel in its unadorned, everyday state once the show is over, to find out more about the chapel and its history.
This is the second of three pieces curated for the space by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, whose most recent documentary Broken English, about the singer Marianne Faithfull, opens in UK cinemas Friday. 27th March.
Miseris Succurrere Disco is an exhibition / installation at Fitzrovia Chapel from Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 25th.
The Fitzrovia Chapel, 2 Pearson Square, London W1T 3BF
Opening times:
11am to 6pm Monday – Saturday
Late night Thursday until 8pm
12pm to 5pm Sunday
Admission free
fitzroviachapel.org
@fitzroviachapel
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s documentary Broken English is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 20th.