V&A East’s plans to shake up the art world with community-inspired museum and storehouse
Gus Casely-Hayford is a man on a mission to open up and diversify the arts sector.
As founding director of V&A East – one of the world’s most significant new museum projects and part of the mayor of London’s £1.1bn Olympic legacy project – he knows that shifting the canon won’t necessarily be easy.
V&A East Museum in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Pic: Victoria & Albert Museum
Casely-Hayford told Sky News: “There are challenges that we have in this country… Years of museum tradition based around particular narratives.
“There’s a fairly conservative bedrock upon which we have to begin to build new narratives. Think about how we can actually include voices that it may have felt acceptable to marginalise a generation ago.”
Based in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, V&A East will bring two brand new arts venues to East London – a five-storey, 7,000 square meter museum on the waterfront, and a vast glass and brick storehouse, offering more than 250,000 curated items for public view, just a 10-minute walk away.
Balenciaga inspired
Based on an X-Ray of a Balenciaga ballgown, and informally dubbed “the crab”, the museum will form part of a new cultural quarter collectively known as East Bank, nestling alongside a Sadler’s Wells dance theatre, BBC recording and performance studios and UAL’s London College of Fashion.
In a world where many consider the arts to be for the privileged few rather than the many, Casely-Hayford says his bid to highlight under-represented voices is clear cut.
He said: “These are our spaces paid for with our tax money. We should all be getting the benefit.”
Having moved back from the US to take up the role (he was previously director of the Smithsonian, National Museum of African Art in Washington DC), Casely-Hayford has applied a fresh view to the British art scene.
X-ray of a silk taffeta Balenciaga evening dress, Paris, 1954. Pic: Nick Veasey, 2016
He said: “Art is one of the things that we do better than anyone else. You look at the sorts of people who represent us best at the Oscars or in music, and they represent the cultural diversity of our nation.
“I would love it if in the museum sector, if we could really get on board with that, invest in that, but not just do it in terms of the art that we display on our walls, but also the people who curate our spaces.”
The Global South
The museum will collect work from around the world, prioritising issues from the Global South – Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania.
And far from being a modern obsession or trendy buzzword, Casely-Hayford believes diversity is woven into the very fabric of being British.
An early concept image for V&A East Museum. Pic: JA Projects
He said: “The thing that makes me proud is that we are a diverse nation. You think about our national flag, that we didn’t choose a tricolour.
“We chose a flag which demonstrates the differences and how we come together, that we are a number of different nations. We accept diversity, complexity, and we want our space to be able to tell those stories.
“All of that cultural complexity, the stories of empire, of enslavement, of all these difficult things. But also, the transcendent stories of how through creativity, we can come together as one.
“We can be a single nation that celebrates greatness, goodness, that celebrates the sorts of things that inspire a new generation.”
‘An engine of transformation’
And he says aside from artists and curator diversity, attention must be turned to both the visitors and staff of the museum too.
“We want to build this institution from the ground up, for and with our local communities. We want it to reflect their need,” he said.
“When it opens in 2025 and you come into our space, I’m hoping that you’ll be welcomed by people who demonstrate the kind of cultural complexity of the people that live in and around this area.”
Not a man to rest on his laurels, he’s quite literally got on his bike to share news of the new spaces to secondary schools in the area, in a bid to talk to 100,000 young people.
Dystopia to Utopia performance. Pic: V&A/Antony Jones
It is his ambition that one of the children who walks through the museum doors will go on to have their art on the walls, or even one day claim his job.
Calling the spaces “an engine of transformation”, he wants the younger generation to see the creative industries as a viable profession, as he says, “not from the margins, not feeling they’re part of the peripheral, but right in the bedrock of institutions like V&A East”.
Holding institutions to account
Ahead of these potential new opportunities, emerging artist Heather Agyepong says the last two years have been transformational in black British art, offering her a position of power as an artist for the first time.
Heather Agyepong, visual artist and actor. Pic: Hydar Dewachi
She told Sky News: “I think since George Floyd was murdered, and the black uprisings, there’s been a real thirst and a kind of embarrassment about the lack of black British art in collections.
“In 2020, all of these institutions gave these massive pleas and dedications to include more black British art, which has been amazing. But I think now, two years on, you’re seeing that some of it was a little bit performative, or for optics.
“For me as an artist now, I feel I can hold those intuitions accountable because they made all of these claims, and I can go back and say, ‘what are you doing to address your collections? What are you doing to address the inclusion of black British art?’
“I feel quite empowered now, as an artist moving forward.”
However, she admits she wasn’t always as clued up about the rich heritage of the UK’s black artists.
Ego death at Jerwood Space, supported by Photoworks. Pic: Anna Arca
She said: “I did an MA at Goldsmiths in 2013, and that was my first introduction to black British art, before then, I think I didn’t even know black British artists existed, if I’m honest.
“My course convenor, Paul Halliday, opened my eyes to what that whole movement looked like. And I remember, I was just stunned, and I felt like, ‘why did no one tell me this?’, because I always felt I was by myself. So, that course was really instrumental in understanding the legacy of us as artists.”
‘Small and in the corner’
Speaking about her latest exhibition, Ego Death, which includes oversized fabric triptychs, one inspired by Oscar winning film Get Out, she says: “There’s a thing sometimes about black artists, we feel like we can’t take up space, that we’ve kind of got to be small and in the corner. Be kind of apologetic.”
She credits artists including Turner Prize winning Lubaina Himid, Sonya Boyce and Claudette Johnson – who all came to prominence during the UK Black Arts movement (BAM) of the 1980s – as “paving the way” for her, adding: “I wouldn’t be here without them.”
Lisa Anderson, managing director of the Black Cultural Archives
Lisa Anderson, managing director of the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), also credits the movement with inspiring her to pursue a career in the arts.
For her latest exhibition, Transforming Legacies, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of BAM, she reunited more than 50 artists of African and Caribbean ancestry to recreate the iconic 1958 A Great Day In Harlem photo.
Anderson says improving representation across the board is a matter of teamwork.
“We need allyship as well. We need collaboration from galleries, other researchers, universities, auction houses so that they can validate and support the growth of the work from these artists,” she said.
Black British artists gather for a photograph inspired by Art Kane’s A Great Day in Harlem. Pic: David Kwaw Mensah
Culture wars
As government funding has dried up, sustained support needed to give communities a level footing has dropped away.
But in the face of adversity, Anderson is hopeful: “We’re in the midst of a culture war with some key figures in the government questioning the importance of equality and inclusion and questions of diversity. So, it is very discombobulating.
“But I think the momentum for focus on artists from the African diaspora in a meaningful, inclusive way is something to be hopeful about. I’m definitely going to be joining hands with other organisations, other key leaders within the UK and internationally to keep that going for the long term.
“What would be horrendous, is if 20 years from now, we’re having to have a similar conversation. I don’t want that to be the case. I just want this conversation to expand.”
Click to subscribe to Backstage wherever you get your podcasts
V&A East Storehouse will open in 2024 and V&A East Museum will open in spring 2025.
Transforming Legacies is on show at Black Cultural Archives, Brixton, until 31st January 2023.
Heather Agyepong’s, Ego Death exhibition was first shown at the Jerwood Space, London, in 2022 and will tour to Belfast Exposed, Northern Ireland, in 2023. Her solo exhibition, Wish You Were Here, will be showing at the new Centre for British Photography from January and her work will be included in Photo50 at the London Art Fair in the new year. She will also be appearing in Amazon Prime’s forthcoming thriller The Power.
Entertainment
‘Ketamine Queen’ Jasveen Sangha pleads guilty to supplying fatal dose that killed Friends star Matthew Perry
A woman known as the “Ketamine Queen” has officially pleaded guilty to selling Friends star Matthew Perry the drug that killed him.
Jasveen Sangha initially denied the charges but agreed to change her plea in a signed statement in August, just a few weeks before she had been due to stand trial.
The 42-year-old , a dual citizen of the US and the UK, has now appeared in a federal court in Los Angeles to plead guilty to five charges, including supplying the ketamine that led to Perry‘s death.
She faces up to 65 years in prison after admitting one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death.
Prosecutors agreed to drop three other counts related to the distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of methamphetamine that was unrelated to the Perry case.
In a brief statement when the plea deal was announced, her lawyer Mark Geragos said she was “taking responsibility for her actions”.
The judge is not bound to follow any terms of the plea agreement, but prosecutors have said they will ask for less than the maximum possible sentence.
Perry died aged 54 in October 2023. He had struggled with addiction for years, but released a memoir a year before his death during a period of being clean.
He had been using ketamine through his regular doctor as a legal, but off-label, treatment for depression, but in the weeks before his death had also started to seek more of the drug illegally.
Perry bought large amounts of ketamine from Sangha, including 25 vials for $6,000 (£4,458) in cash four days before his death, prosecutors said.
Read more:
The Hollywood drugs network exposed by Perry’s death
Obituary: The one who made everyone laugh
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What Perry’s death says about Hollywood
Sangha, described by prosecutors as the “Ketamine Queen of North Hollywood”, is now the fifth and final person to plead guilty to charges connected to the supply of drugs to the Friends star.
The actor’s live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, an acquaintance Erik Fleming, and a physician, Mark Chavez, all agreed to plead guilty when the charges were announced in August 2024.
Another doctor, Salvador Plasencia, initially pleaded not guilty and had been due to face trial alongside Sangha, but changed his plea in July.
Sangha and Plasencia had been the primary targets of the investigation.
The three other defendants: Chavez, Iwamasa and Fleming pleaded guilty in exchange for their co-operation, which included statements implicating Sangha and Plasencia.
Perry had bought ketamine from Sangha after he was led to her by Fleming, prosecutors said.
On the day of Perry’s death, Sangha told Fleming they should delete all the messages they had sent each other, according to Sangha’s indictment.
Sangha is due to be sentenced on 10 December.
The other four defendants are also still awaiting sentencing.
Perry was one of the biggest stars of his generation as Chandler Bing in Friends – which ran on NBC between 1994 and 2004.
He starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for all 10 seasons of the show.
The Friends stars were among around 20 mourners who attended his funeral in November 2023, according to TMZ.
Before he died alone in his jacuzzi, Matthew Perry had received three injections of ketamine in the space of just six hours. “Shoot me up with a big one,” he told his personal assistant, ahead of the final, fatal dose.
According to court documents, in the period leading up to 28 October 2023, Kenneth Iwamasa was illegally administering Perry with between six and eight shots of the drug, an anaesthetic that can have hallucinogenic effects, each day.
A live-in assistant, he admitted to finding the actor unconscious at his Pacific Palisades home on at least two occasions in the weeks prior.
The hit that ultimately killed the Friends star was supplied by Jasveen Sangha, also known as the “Ketamine Queen” – a dealer who apparently only dealt “with high-end and celebs”. She has agreed to plead guilty to five charges and will appear in court later today.
Her charges, along with others filed against Iwamasa and others over the supply of ketamine to Perry, exposed part of Hollywood’s underground drug network – and put the spotlight on the world of celebrity, money and power.
Jasveen Sangha was known as the ‘Ketamine Queen’. Pic: Jojo Korsh/BFA.com/Shutterstock
‘Yes men’ with terrible consequences
Perry’s death was met with both utter shock and a sad sense of the inevitable. The world knew him best as Chandler Bing, the comic heartbeat of Friends. But behind the jokes and the sarcasm, he was deeply troubled.
“It almost felt like we’d been mourning Matthew for a long time because his battle with that disease was a really hard one for him to fight,” is how his former co-star Jennifer Aniston described his addiction in a recent interview. “As hard as it was for all of us and for the fans, there’s a part of me that thinks this is better… I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”
The actor was an addict, and vulnerable – but also a huge star, worth millions.
Kenneth Iwamasa was Matthew Perry’s live-in assistant. Pic: APEX / The Mega Agency
Iwamasa was administering the injections, ultimately playing God – but to him, the power most likely lay with his famous boss. His actions may seem inexcusable, but did he feel he had a choice?
“I think it was a situation that increasingly got more and more out of control,” says Bonnie Low-Kramen, a former celebrity assistant turned trainer, and author of Be The Ultimate Assistant.
Photos: Photos: Jojo Korsh/BFA.com/Shutterstock/ APEX/The Mega Agency/ AP/ DoJ/ AP
Those who do the job, especially in Los Angeles, can be put under an enormous amount of pressure, she says, “tasked with doing things many of us wouldn’t imagine carrying out for our employers. It is a job which comes with an inherent power imbalance”.
Which means it can be incredibly hard to say no.
“When people are rich and famous, they often have people around them who won’t say no,” she says. “And assistants are in the yes business anyway.
“We’re in the business of figuring out, ‘well, let’s solve the problem…’. When money is no object, there are new rules that apply in that situation and that can be really hard to handle.”
Iwamasa is not the first celebrity assistant asked to administer or pick up illegal drugs, she says, and Perry is not the first star to die after taking drugs.
Money Iwamasa paid for ketamine. Pic Central District of California Prosecutor’s Office
Ms Low-Kramen highlights the deaths of Janis Joplin, Prince and John Belushi as just a few other examples.
“Unfortunately, there are so many examples of this tragic end, where the abuse of drugs gets to a point where they’ve handled it for a really long time, and then the day comes when it can’t be handled anymore.”
For those struggling with addiction, being surrounded by “yes men” can have terrible consequences, says Garrett Braukman, an addiction treatment executive in Hollywood.
“Treatment is difficult for people when they have yes men. They have a lot of people that are going to tell them you can get whatever you want, you can get drugs, you can get alcohol, you could do whatever, and no one is willing to really look at that from the perspective of how dangerous that is.”
Read more:
Obituary: The one who made everyone laugh
Matthew Perry: A life in pictures
Material prosecutors said was taken from Sangha’s ‘stash house’. Pic: Central District of California Prosecutor’s Office
Mr Braukman says addiction can go hand in hand with fame and that a “high” percentage of his patients work in the entertainment industry.
“I don’t know how I would be able to stay clean and sober if I go to my grandma’s house and there’s 20 guys outside of my grandma’s house taking pictures of me walking in. You become an animal to a degree that people are watching.”
Dr Salvador Plasencia appeared in court in July. Pic: Reuters/Mike Blake
Rise in use of ketamine
The use of ketamine recreationally has been on the rise in recent years, in the UK as well as the US. In England, some 3,609 people started treatment for problems with the drug in the year 2023-2024 – more than eight times the number in 2014-2015, when 426 sought help, according to government statistics.
In January, drag queen The Vivienne was found dead in the bath at their home in Cheshire, aged 32. The star’s family later told how the performer had died “from the effects of ketamine use causing a cardiac arrest”.
Ketamine is usually taken recreationally as a crushed powder, but also sometimes injected or swallowed – making people feel detached and dreamlike. It can also cause severe bladder and kidney problems.
The Vivienne died after taking ketamine in January 2025. Pic: PA
Perry’s struggles with alcohol and other drugs, before ketamine, were long running and well documented, starting with drinking as a teenager before moving on to painkilling prescription drugs Vicodin and OxyContin, and tranquilliser Xanax.
“I have spent upward of $7m (£5.8m) trying to get sober,” he wrote in his memoir, released when he was clean, just a year before his death.
While accepting the almost unsurpassable legacy of the hit show that made him a star, he said he hoped his support for fellow addicts would be the achievement he was best remembered for.
“When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned – I want helping others to be the first thing that’s mentioned and I’m going to live the rest of my life proving that.”
He only lived for another year.
Perry (centre) with his Friends co-stars David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and Matt LeBlanc at the Emmys in 2002. Pic: Reuters
Illegal use v therapy
Before he died, Perry had been undergoing legal ketamine infusion therapy to treat depression and anxiety. The drug can be used as a treatment in clinical settings in the US, and some specialist and private centres in the UK – although there are concerns from some medics here about its use even in those settings.
According to a postmortem report, the actor had reportedly been clean for 19 months before he started obtaining the drug illegally as well.
It was not the supervised doses that killed him, but the idea of an addict taking the drug to help their problems might still sound shocking.
Pic: Reuters
In California, ketamine drips are legally used as pain relief, to treat mood disorders and to help with addiction. Other celebrities and notable figures – including Chrissy Teigen, Elon Musk and Sharon Osbourne – have all shared details of ketamine therapy and how it helped them.
Dr Austin Harris, owner and medical director at NeuroRelief Ketamine Infusion Therapy, says historically the drug is “extremely safe” when used in the right conditions, and swears by its effectiveness.
At the clinic in California, he explained to Sky News how it can help people with mood disorders and chronic pain, as well as those in recovery from drug or alcohol abuse.
“Which a lot of people who don’t really understand this at a scientific level might think is an oxymoron,” he says. “But actually, it’s profoundly beneficial – done properly – in resetting both neurologic and psychological patterns for substance abuse.”
Ketamine treatment at NeuroRelief Ketamine Infusion Therapy in LA
Ketamine infusion “restarts in our brain what should already be there”, he says, in terms of “the neurologic road workers, to be able to then direct, to build new patterns and actual new nerve pathways”.
One patient having therapy at the clinic also spoke to us, saying he had abused alcohol and marijuana, and occasionally opiate painkillers, for many years.
“I’ve had enough experience and decades of being addicted to drugs and alcohol and traumas and trying different things,” he said. “When I came out of that infusion I was like, wait a minute. I didn’t have the shakes. I didn’t have the cravings.”
Read more:
Parties and busted doors: Living next to ‘Ketamine Queen’
The drug addiction leaving users in chronic pain
Dr Harris emphasises the need for administration by a professional in a clinical setting. “Matthew Perry was being illegally sold ketamine on the black market. The fact that a doctor happened to be one of several people that was illegally selling it to him should not be confused with the appropriate legal utilisation of ketamine.”
The actor was vulnerable, Dr Harris continues. “It’s absolutely abominable… You have someone with serious addiction problems, lifelong. And sadly, I think that he was really taken advantage of.”
The drugs stash
As well as Sangha and Iwamasa, the others charged over Perry’s death are Erik Fleming, an associate of Perry’s who was in contact with Sangha, Dr Mark Chavez, a physician, and Dr Salvador Plasencia, who also supplied ketamine illegally to Perry.
“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Dr Plasencia said in a text exchange between him and Chavez.
Dr Mark Chavez, a physician from San Diego, pleaded guilty in court last year. Pic: AP/ Damian Dovargan
After Perry died, Sangha desperately sought to cover her involvement. “Delete all our messages,” she instructed Fleming in a message on Signal.
In March 2024, law enforcement searched Sangha’s home and found 1.7kg of pressed pills containing methamphetamine, 79 vials of liquid ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy) tablets, counterfeit Xanax pills, baggies containing powdered ketamine and cocaine, and other drug-trafficking items such as a gold money counting machine, a scale, a wireless signal and hidden camera detector, drug packaging materials, and $5,723 in cash, according to her plea agreement.
Sangha was happy to supply to Hollywood’s rich and famous – and not an anomaly.
Several books have been written by Tinseltown dealers, and only a few months ago, the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial heard from a former personal assistant to the hip-hop mogul who testified about meeting sellers for his boss.
Now, as she becomes the last defendant to admit her role in Perry’s death, the Ketamine Queen’s guilty plea brings to a close the criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragedy.
But in a world where money talks, where fame and addiction or mental health issues often go hand-in-hand, it is unlikely to be the last.
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