NAMING RIGHTS
- Five or six single-artist exhibitions are held per year as well as one-off events
- Content and duration of exhibitions are proposed by each artist.
- Submission is open, although artists can also be solicited Internationally recognised artists are invited, as well as (very) local artists.
- Naming Rights strives not to be directed by academic, commercial, or charitable hegemony
- It is privately funded and runs on a shoestring It is not-for-profit It receives no support or subsidies from the Local Authority
- The materials for each event or exhibition accrue to the next
- There are no private views
- There is an advisory board
- NAMING RIGHTS is located at 45 Compton Close, London NW1 3QS.
- In the words of Phyllida Barlow, “It is a nothing space” …where doubt and permeability are fostered
Founded in 2015, NAMING RIGHTS is located in a public housing estate in Central London. NAMING RIGHTS is an artwork as exhibition space, with simple, specific material preconditions. Its rules are intended to create direct personal interactions between audience and singular artworks. Other strictures are intended to impose (materially) the least restrictive alternatives to gallery or other artist-run spaces. Fundraising strategies for NAMING RIGHTS are transparent and also part of the artwork. In this way, specific material and procedural conditions are intended to bring economic and aesthetic contradictions to bear on the art and its context. Though the space is intended to foreground unusual and difficult practices of other artists, corollary objects and events used and produced in NAMING RIGHTS are artworks of Dustin Ericksen.
Its title, ‘Naming Rights’, refers to an option to sell naming rights to the space at £18000 a year. Through attention to funding and focus on social engagement (both to the general and specific art public), the programme at NAMING RIGHTS reflects upon the problems and contradictions that occur when both art and the mechanisms of its presentation are simultaneously aestheticised.