Contemporary Art Marathon Hits Shoreditch and Whitechapel as Third Day Focuses on East London
By Harper-Thames | Shore Roar
London Gallery Weekend organises its three days around different areas of the city, with Sunday dedicated to East London, which means that the contemporary art ecosystem that runs from Shoreditch through Whitechapel and into Bethnal Green and beyond receives a concentrated day of gallery-going public that the rest of the year distributes more evenly. I used this as an occasion to do the gallery walk that I have been planning since approximately March and executing in fragments rather than systematically, which is how gallery-going works when it competes with the other demands on a Shoreditch journalist’s time.
What I Saw
The galleries participating in London Gallery Weekend in the East London section include spaces ranging from the serious commercial galleries whose artists are represented at auction through the mid-size galleries whose programme is interesting and whose prices are aspirational rather than institutional, to the project spaces and artist-run organisations that operate at the intersection of exhibition programme and artist community support. The combination produces a day of art-going that covers more ground aesthetically than any single gallery could provide, which is the Gallery Weekend’s specific contribution to the city’s art ecology: creating a day where the breadth of what London does with contemporary art is legible in a way it usually isn’t.
I spent the longest time at a Bethnal Green gallery showing the work of an artist whose practice involves collecting objects that have been discarded in specific London postcodes and presenting them in arrangements that are simultaneously archival and aesthetic. The work is the kind that you either find immediately compelling or that requires the wall text to activate, and I found it immediately compelling, which is either evidence of taste or evidence of the specific susceptibility to a certain kind of conceptual art that I have developed through too much gallery-going and cannot now turn off.
The East London Art Scene: Its State
The East London art scene is in the state that scenes are in when they have been established long enough to have institutions but recent enough that the institutions have not calcified: there are galleries here with fifteen and twenty years of programme behind them that are still taking risks on new work and new artists. There are artist-run spaces that have survived rent increases that should have killed them. There are studios in buildings that are one planning application away from becoming apartments but have not yet become apartments. The ecosystem is functional and financially precarious in the way that art ecosystems are functional and financially precarious, and London Gallery Weekend is the annual occasion to appreciate what it contains before the next planning application arrives.
Harper-Thames writes about Shoreditch from the perspective of someone who arrived recently enough to find it extraordinary and has been here long enough to find it complicated. The neighbourhood is both the cliche and the real thing simultaneously: yes, there are bottomless brunches and tech startups and overpriced flat whites. Also: genuine creative energy, cultural diversity, architectural interest, and the specific quality of a place that is making itself up as it goes along, which is either exhausting or exciting depending on what you need from where you live. Harper-Thames finds it mostly exciting, which is why she keeps writing about it. For Shoreditch events, see Time Out London. For East London nightlife, visit DesignMyNight. For Shoreditch arts and culture, see Evening Standard.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
Harper-Thames arrived in Shoreditch three years ago from a city that she will not name because naming it produces a specific kind of conversation she is tired of having, and found what she was looking for, which was a neighbourhood that rewarded paying attention. She has been paying attention since, and writing about what she finds, which is more interesting and more complicated and more worth writing about than the media narrative of Shoreditch-as-startup-playground captures. The startup playground is real. So is the arts scene, the community history, the music venues, the food markets, the people who have been here for forty years and the people who arrived last month. She is interested in all of them, which is why Shore Roar covers Shoreditch in the plural rather than the singular.
