Room with Rooms is an exhibition design project for the National Portrait Gallery in London, that stages a dialogue between Catherine Opie’s expansive portrait practice and the long history of portraiture housed within the institution. Rather than dispersing Opie’s works throughout the galleries, the design reconstitutes the Gallery itself within the exhibition, creating “rooms within rooms” that allow for a direct encounter with both the formalities of portraiture and the politics of identity.

The architectural framework organizes the show as a sequence of square and rectilinear spaces threaded by enfilade views, recalling the classical rhythm of museum galleries while simultaneously misaligning their axes. This subtle displacement reframes familiar conventions through the lens of queerness—introducing moments of defamiliarization within a recognizably traditional setting. The first rooms stage Opie’s most radical and political works within formal containers, while later spaces blur distinctions between portrait and landscape, the personal and the collective.

The progression of spaces moves from the most explicitly “queer room” toward a closing installation of surfers and football players set within a horizon, a gesture that extends Opie’s concern with democracy and humanity across personal, political, and national registers. Sightlines reinforce this dialogue, connecting self-portraits, family photographs, and community-based works into a layered narrative of inclusion, visibility, and identity.