London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE to present Room with All Existing Words, a new site-specific commission by Mark Manders.
Installed above the ancient Temple of Mithras, and alongside the Roman artefacts discovered on the Bloomberg site, the installation will transform the gallery into a space suspended between past and present, inviting visitors to consider how our understanding of history is constructed and imagined from the fragments that survive.
For over thirty years, Manders has developed what he describes as a ‘self-portrait as a building’: an evolving body of work where sculptures, objects, and texts form a cohesive fictional world. His practice is marked by contrasts, where sculptures appear at once like unearthed relics and also like works abruptly abandoned in the studio. Bronze and clay forms seem frozen in mid-construction, while fragments of language, including his own invented newspapers, appear partly hidden or painted over, suggesting meaning without ever fully revealing it. In his writing, Manders considers how art can be both understandable and mysterious, complete and unfinished—creating pieces that feel timeless.
At London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, these ideas will find a powerful echo. A monumental sculpture featuring a human head will create an environment that feels both ancient and immediate, as though the viewer has stumbled upon artefacts recently left behind. Manders’ commission will play with ambiguity through objects that could be mistaken for ancient relics yet resist clear categorisation. In dialogue with a site layered with history, dating to 240 AD, Room with All Existing Words will underscore the way history is continually re-written: revealing what is preserved, what is lost, and what remains unresolved
Mark Manders, Room with All Existing Words, 22nd January 2026 – July 2026 London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE
You will be able to engage further with the exhibition using the Bloomberg digital guide, available on Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture app. Bloomberg Connects provides free digital guides to over 1,200 museums, galleries, gardens, public art, festivals, historic sites, and other cultural spaces, making it easy to access and engage with arts and culture from mobile devices, anytime, anywhere.
Download the app on the Apple Store or Google Play today.
About the Artist
Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, The Netherlands) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores how time, language, and memory shape our perception of objects and spaces. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, and writing, Manders constructs environments that feel both familiar and estranged – places where meaning seems to hover just out of reach. Over more than three decades, he has developed a distinctive visual language that merges human and architectural forms with everyday materials such as wood, furniture, and found objects. His sculptures often appear poised between creation and decay, evoking a quiet psychological tension that has become central to his practice.
Manders has exhibited widely at major international institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. He represented the Netherlands at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) with his acclaimed installation Room with Broken Sentence. Recent exhibitions include Silent Studio (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2024), Three Related Works (Modern Art, London, 2025), and Tilted Head (Public Art Fund, New York, 2019), supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
He is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Xavier Hufkens Gallery, Brussels; Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo and Modern Art, London.
