RECESS opens its archive of almost 30,000 photos at 55 Curtain Road in Shoreditch from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 November, according to the event page on recess.land. The three-day run celebrates ten years of the party series, and is powered by Nike London.
Opening hours are 2pm to 9pm on Friday 13 November, midday to 9pm on Saturday 14 November and 11am to 5pm on Sunday 15 November. The listing says “entry is free, but book your hour”, with slots taken through the event page.
The material covers a decade of nights: “almost 30,000 photos. hours and hours of video. parties across london and around the world, the rooms, the people, the style we built along the way,” the page says. It adds: “an archive isn’t a box of old things. we use ours to make something new.” The three days are built around three things: the rebuilt STYX warehouse, a searchable photo archive and a driving game.
Almost 30,000 photos and a Fotolab selfie search
Ten years of photographs have each been read and made searchable. Visitors take a selfie at a station called the Fotolab, which then searches the whole archive for their face. They pick a favourite, print it and take it home. The selfie is not kept, and prints are free while they last.
The venue is on a street with a long performance history of its own, set out in Made in Shoreditch’s account of Shakespeare and the Curtain theatre on Curtain Road.
STYX rebuilt in Apple Vision Pro
The second element is STYX FOREVER, a reconstruction of the warehouse where RECESS began. “STYX, on Ashley Road in Tottenham Hale, was RECESS’s first home. we lost it to gentrification in 2018,” the STYX FOREVER page says.
That page says: “every photo and video we had of the place went into rebuilding it in Apple Vision Pro. put on the headset and walk the warehouse again, step up to the decks, play with the lights.”
STYX FOREVER is booked separately from entry to the main room, on its own page, and runs on Friday and Saturday only. Listed Friday sessions start at 2pm and run to 8.40pm at 25-minute intervals, with the 6.10pm, 6.35pm and 7pm slots shown as full at the time of capture. Sessions are 13+ only. Glasses do not fit in the headset; contact lenses are fine, and the page says soft lenses are best because hard lenses can throw off the eye tracking. The booking form asks whether visitors have used VR or an Apple Vision Pro before, whether they wear glasses or contacts, whether they have or have had seizures or epilepsy, and whether they get motion or car sickness.
RECESS Racer, the t-shirt archive and the talks
The third element is a game. RECESS Racer is a driving game set in a RECESS venue: visitors set a lap, get on the board, and the quickest lap each day wins a golden keyring. No booking is needed.
Also in the room is a t-shirt archive, with RECESS tees from across the ten years on the walls. The archive tees are there to look at, not to buy. A RECESS x Nike tee is available only in the room.
A selection of posters runs from the first night in 2016 to now. The graphic catalogue is in the room as well, covering every graphic the team has made across 480 pages in two volumes; prints are for sale online through a QR code in the room. The RECESS x Bloomed in Dark Rooms zine, shot by Musti, Lekky and Aiyana from Bloomed in Dark Rooms, runs to 100 pages captured at RECESSLAND and is described as a snapshot of a London summer in 2026. Ten years of RECESS are on DVD, one disc for each year, playing on the projector with sound in the room.
Three talks run under the title PROCESS.ZIP. On Friday at 6.30pm, Jojo and Roni take on surveillance versus archiving. On Saturday at 5pm, Thomas Morgan and RBC cover listening to images. On Sunday at 3pm, the subject is designing the dance floor, with Jojo, listed against RECESS’s 2nd birthday night.
The space is not step-free. The nearest stations are Old Street, Shoreditch High Street and Liverpool Street, which puts the venue within walking distance of the junction and the independent retailers covered in this guide to shops near Old Street station.
The Curtain Road weekend is not the end of the anniversary programme. The RECESS site lists two 10 Year Birthday Party dates at Outernet Live, on Sunday 20 December and Monday 28 December, in a month already filled with Christmas markets, late shopping and festive events across east London.