NAMING RIGHTS
Small-scale cultural economies in London, and more generally Europe face shrinking financial support. Not-for-profit spaces, but also small commercial galleries have been affected by the ideological destruction of the welfare state and publicly supported cultural production. NAMING RIGHTS has been deliberately established in the heart of this targeted and beleaguered space.
“It goes without saying that a subordination of cultural activities to market logic leads to the reinstatement of class division and privilege.” – Claire Bishop, Con-Demmed to the Bleakest of Futures: Report from the UK, E-Flux Journal no. 22, 01 – 2011
NAMING RIGHTS, the particulars:
- Five or six single-artist exhibitions are held per year as well as one-off events
- All materials used to create the space (including walls) are recycled from Art Fairs or Commercial Galleries.
- 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. The space is intended to foreground unusual and difficult practices of other artists, and the corollary objects and events used and produced in NAMING RIGHTS are artworks of Dustin Ericksen.