Free display Installation
Open Monuments by Melek Zeynep Bulut
Explore a new installation at the Design Museum, created by artist and designer Melek Zeynep Bulut in collaboration with London Design Festival.
What to expect
Open Monuments is an installation made up of monolithic urban objects transforming the entrance of the Design Museum into a site of ongoing performance and experimental experience that reimagines public spaces.
This free-to-visit installation welcomes visitors to interact and connect, becoming a meeting point and a place for mindful reflection and rest. It's also an invitation to interact with the work itself, which unfolds and evolves through the participation of those who encounter it.
These sculptural yet functional structures are not simply objects to be seen, but rhythms to be felt. Open Monuments is formed from the most elemental shapes – the point, the line, the circle, and the square. The pieces are conceived as “performers” in the city. Their arrangement and role can be shaped and reshaped continuously as much by the context of their surroundings as by the mood of their users. These components initiate open-ended staging, responding simultaneously to the needs of the user and the character of the city.
The installation encompass the functions of urban furniture, providing space for sitting, resting, gathering, or simply passing through. They also create an abstract spatial construct that integrates rather than imposes on its environment, offering an inviting setting for encounter and memory. Subtle lighting lends the objects a second life after dark, their soft glow extending the invitation into the evening.
Images by Mark Cocksedge
About the project
Following the success of London Design Festival’s 23rd edition, which drew thousands of visitors to experience design across the city in September 2025, the festival is excited to extend its public programming with this new installation at the Design Museum, created by artist and designer Melek Zeynep Bulut.
This extension of LDF's public programming reinforces the Festival's commitment to bringing world-class design directly into London's cultural landscape, creating lasting dialogue between contemporary design and Londoners.
Open Monuments demonstrates the power of design to transform public spaces and foster meaningful community engagement.
About the artist
Melek Zeynep Bulut is a London-based Turkish multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work synthesises space, experimental architecture, behavioural sciences, and visual arts. She focuses on the complex interplay between material, experimental circulation fiction, and human consciousness, exploring and exhibiting how existence and subjectivity are shaped by space. Her practice employs a multilingual production technique, encompassing sculpture, installation, photography, performance, painting, and video art. Melek’s work continues to evolve at the intersection of disciplines, creating spaces that function as portals between the physical and the metaphysical, inviting reflection on the rituals and patterns that shape human experience.
Plan your visit
Visit Information
The free installation will be on show at the museum's entrance from 1 to 14 December 2025, from 10:00 to 17:00 (Mon-Thu) and 10:00 to 18:00 (Fri-Sun).
No pre-booking is required.
In collaboration with
London Design Festival
Established in 2003 by Sir John Sorrell CBE and Ben Evans CBE, London Design Festival celebrates and promotes London as the design capital of the world. London Design Festival has since earned the reputation as a key calendar moment of London’s autumn creative season, alongside London Fashion Week, Frieze Art Fair and the London Film Festival, attracting the greatest thinkers, practitioners, retailers and educators to the capital, in a citywide celebration.
Bloomberg Connects
Bloomberg Connects offers free digital guides to more than 1000 cultural organisations around the world. The app is part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ commitment to supporting digital innovation in the arts. With dynamic content exclusive to each partner organisation, the app provides a range of features including video, audio, text, and wayfinding maps. Bloomberg Connects makes it easy to access and engage with arts and culture from mobile devices when visiting in person, or anytime from anywhere.
Discover more
Background image: Design Museum exterior photographed by Matthew Kaltenborn. Melek Zeynep Bulut's portrait by Mark Cocksedge.