Love at the Levy Flat

By Kennedy Randall

Maren Hassinger’s installation Love anchors Raven Row’s new exhibition Nomenclature for the Time Being. The intervention takes place in the seldom-used top floor flat – a space that, much to my surprise, resembles an eclectic time capsule of the 1970s. 

When founder and director Alex Sainsbury acquired 56 and 58 Artillery Lane in 2004 to open the non-profit contemporary art space Raven Row, sisters Rebecca and Hannah Levy were still living in the top-floor flat. This had been home since 1918, when their father, who had spent his working life in the Spitalfields fruit and vegetable market around the corner, moved the family to the neighbourhood. After the flat’s last renovations following a fire in 1972, the women, already in their sixties, lived out the rest of the twentieth century in an unaltered vision of the 1970s. Come 2004, Hannah and Rebecca had no intention of remodelling. 

As Sainsbury began to renovate and build Raven Row’s programme, he allowed the Levy sisters to stay in their home, rent-free, until their deaths, while the space beneath them transformed into a home for international contemporary art. When Rebecca, the eldest and longest-living sister, passed away in 2009 at 98, Sainsbury decided to leave the flat untouched, complete with its quintessential period wallpaper, family heirlooms, kitchen utensils, and half-full mini brandy bottles in the iconic home bar.

"an eclectic time capsule of the 1970s"

Initially used as quirky accommodation for visiting artists, Sainsbury wanted to make further use of the suite. In 2013, he commissioned Canadian conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER& to rework his famed installation Bagged Place (1966) there, and so the Levy flat became, for a short time, Rebecca’s Bagged Place. BAXTER& shrink-wrapped the flat, floor to ceiling, from the decorative golden leaf carpet to the characteristically 70s light fixtures. While BAXTER&’s initial 1966 iteration of the installation alluded to the isolating commodification and sterile nature of items that make up our domestic lives, the 2013 rendition at Raven Row physically stopped time, poignantly preserving the Levys’ personal effects. By wrapping each design element, appliance, furniture item, and heirloom individually in plastic, BAXTER& elevated their status to that of museum objects – and their deceased owners to historical figures. 

Thirteen years later, the Levy flat hosts Maren Hassinger’s work, Love, part of Raven Row’s latest exhibition Nomenclature for the Time Being. Taking its name from the 2022 book-length poem by Dionne Brand, the artists featured vary in their chosen mediums, yet all emphasise the body, sculptural quality, and a Black feminist materiality, viewing objects as imbued with political, historical, and social force. 

With a career spanning five decades, African American Hassinger is known for her fervent multi-disciplinary practice, with an attention to ecology, human desire for connection, and experimentation with impermanent and industrial materials. A series of site-specific installations arranged in different shapes, Love fills the walls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Studio Museum, Harlem, among many others. 

In its latest incarnation, Hassinger fills the Levy flat with a different kind of plastic to BAXTER&’s: hundreds of pink bags filled with human breath and one-word ‘love’ notes.

Upon reaching the top floor of the exhibition, a mezuzah hangs at the flat’s doorway – a reminder of the Levy family heritage; inside, a long hallway opens up, an immense glow emanating from the plastic bags lining the ceiling while eclectic artworks line the walls. Beneath the bags’ pink clouds filled with the breath of the living, the personal heirlooms and historic furniture of those who have passed. The vibrant neon artificiality casts a strange pink shadow onto the subdued 1970s interior, creating a stark juxtaposition between time periods while simultaneously feeling like a new beginning. Each bag becomes a living vessel, a memorialisation of life breathed into the space since the early 1900s. 

London hosts an abundance of contemporary projects in historic spaces, yet here small personal items and visible lived history intertwine with the work itself. Raven Row and the Levy Flat testify to the value of preserving that which would usually be eradicated, melding fresh ideas and art forms into existing spaces and histories to create something altogether novel. Enabling the present and past to live and evolve alongside each other, each telling its own story, Hassinger’s intervention preserves an astonishing slice of history while simultaneously breathing new life into it.

Nomenclature for the Time Being will be on view until 6 September 2026.