Mark Manders: Room with All Existing Words

Exhibition overview

London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE showcases a series of contemporary art commissions, responding to and bringing fresh perspective to the history of the site. Our current installation, Room with All Existing Words, is the work of Dutch artist Mark Manders.

For more than three decades, Manders has developed what he describes as a ‘self-portrait as a building’: a collection of sculptures, objects, and texts that form a cohesive yet imagined world reflecting his inner thinking. His work often appears suspended between states, resembling both unearthed relics and pieces left abruptly, unfinished in an artist’s studio.

Installed above the ancient Temple of Mithras and beside a display of over 600 Roman artefacts uncovered during excavations for Bloomberg’s European headquarters, Manders presents Room with All Existing Words as a space poised between past and present.

A large sculpture comprised of different elements, including the form of a human head, adds to the sense of having stumbled upon artefacts or objects recently left behind. Alongside the sculpture, Manders has created a ‘newspaper’ containing every word in the English language, arranged at random, and a postcard that offers no clues to its content or imagery. Together, these works reflect Manders’ interest in language and form as fragments – materials that imply meaning but resist interpretation – leaving the installation untethered from any specific time or place.

In dialogue with a site layered with history, Room with All Existing Words invites visitors to consider how our understanding of the past is shaped from the fragments and artefacts that survive, revealing what is preserved, what is lost, and what remains unresolved.

Mark Manders
(b. 1968, Volkel, The Netherlands)

Mark Manders is a multidisciplinary artist who works 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. Manders lives and works in Ronse Belgium, and has exhibited widely at major international institutions. In 2013 he represented the Netherlands at the 55th Venice Biennale with his acclaimed installation Room with Broken Sentence.

Bloomberg SPACE

A series of contemporary art commissions responding to the site’s rich archaeological history.

Current exhibition:

Past exhibitions: