Henry Svendsen - Lovers Hold

Henry Svendsen is showing Lovers Hold at the V&A South Kensington this weekend, on Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 October. It's a short run — just the two days — and it sits inside the museum's Medieval & Renaissance galleries in Room 50a.

Lovers Hold is part of Svendsen's ongoing look at the plinth and the spatial politics of cruising sites. He takes the sculptural support — the thing that usually just holds a piece of art up — and reimagines it as a structure shaped by intimacy, proximity and bodily negotiation. He draws on furniture designed for closeness, like the loveseat, and from there builds a series of viscous, grotto-like forms suspended around stainless steel armatures, supporting multiple bodies in states of repose.

There's a specific reference here to the improvised and temporary nature of outdoor cruising sites, and the sculptures materialise fleeting moments of contact, appearing as accumulated traces of desire. The work asks how bodies gather through structures not originally designed to hold them, and what it means to rest, lean, linger and make contact in public space. It's a piece that thinks about the physical distance between people and the way we negotiate space when we're close to one another.

The display is part of the V&A x London Design Festival 2026 exhibition Awakenings, which runs across the museum and looks at how design, craft and technology can inspire new perspectives, spark curiosity and bring to light invisible yet interconnected forces. Awakenings was curated by Kristian Volsing and produced by Katya Spiers.

Lovers Hold is free to see, and the V&A is open from 10.00 to 17.30 on both days, so you can drop in whenever suits you best.