An insider's view of London Art Fair 2023: community, connection, home
Following recently announced UK Arts funding cuts and the cancellation of two other art fairs in London, Masterpiece and the Art & Antiques Fair Olympia, this year’s London Art Fair (18-22nd January) at Islington Business Design centre was under pressure to attract collectors and visitors in numbers amidst a worrying fair landscape.
Commercially, art fairs draw together galleries, dealers, collectors and artists, providing a crucial platform for emerging exhibitors and driving revenue for more established gallerists. Yet at its heart, is a space for community and a home for great art and art lovers to connect. Themes of community, connection and home pumped life through an exceptional line-up of over 100 leading galleries from across the globe at this year’s London Art Fair 2023.
Home: Identity, Community, Memory
Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, London Art Fair. Photography by Mark CocksedgeOfficial museum partner for the London Art Fair, Ben Uri Gallery (London, UK) placed home at the centre of this year’s exhibition Art, Identity, Migration. Ben Uri is an 85-year old institution that has transformed from a Jewish community art society into a museum holding the work of immigrants born in 45 different countries. This year’s display presented highlights from the permanent collection, exploring three waves of migration to Britain. Navigating concepts of displacement, Güler Ates’ Home Performance 1 (2014) was a standout piece alongside Lancelot Ribeiro’s King Lear (1964).
Established in 2020, Wilder Gallery’s (London, UK) exhibition of Lydia Baker’s utopian and matriarchal work recalls the seminal work of Georgia O’Keefe, with a softly ethereal and warmly maternal series of landscapes that
echo the interiors of bodies and fluid figures [that] adaptively root themselves back into nature.
Earth as our primary home provided a recurring theme for galleries, as Siger Gallery (London, UK) featured artists reutilising discarded items from consumer society to warn of the potential for
unchecked growth of abandoned sites and materials…to enmesh and engulf not just the natural world, but humanity itself.
Photo 1 - Adaeze Ihebom, The Artist's Room, 2022 © Adaeze Ihebom. Photo 2 - Bernice Mulenga, Orpheus Jay, friends on film, 2021. Photo 3 - Rubee Samuel 'Ile away from Uno, Featuring, Mr & Mrs Samuel' 2020. Courtesy of the artist LAF.
London Art Fair’s annual exhibition of contemporary photography, Photo50, presented Beautiful Experiments for its 2023 edition. Curated by Pelumi Odubanjo and Katy Barron, the exhibition platformed multigenerational women photographers whose practice engages with their diasporic heritage, exploring
domestic life and the home as not only a physical place but also a space of memory and generational exchange.
Here, home is explored in all its facets - a safe space, a queer space, a space of isolation and a place of memory, home as non-physical, home as both real and imagined to
disentangle the lexicon of the home from it’s traditionally quiet, pliant, and feminine position.
Bernice Mulenga’s on-going series #friendsonfilm explores friendship and queer communities as a space of
security and care where self-expression is encouraged and there is freedom to be oneself.
Maxine Walker’s series Front Room (1987) was a similarly visceral piece, affecting in its use of slide projection to evoke the ghostly texture of memory and nostalgia for home.