On 12 May 2022, the 18th Annual Geoffrey Bawa Memorial Lecture was delivered by South African architect Sumayya Vally– the principal of the inter-disciplinary architectural studio Counterspace. Due to the imposition of curfew in Sri Lanka, Sumayya Vally’s lecture was delivered virtually, live from Geoffrey Bawa’s home in Colombo.

Sumayya Vally carries an obsession for Johannesburg and her work around narrative, identity and memory in the city have admitted her into a host of conceptual and investigatory projects, including a position as assistant curator and film producer for La Biennale di Venezia 2014 (South African Pavilion). Sumayya has recently been selected as a finalist (top 3) for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation architecture residency prize (2019) and was a finalist for the Rolex Mentorship and Protege award (2018/2019). In 2021, she was named in the TIME100 Next list celebrating as one the world’s leaders primed to shape the future.

Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. Her love for Johannesburg serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/1, the youngest architect ever to receive this prestigious commission.

This lecture is supported by the exclusive media partners Daily Mirror and the Sunday Times and radio partners TNL Now and Lite 87.