I, The Transformation Gallery, am still here

People believe I opened in Brixton in April of 2024. They have a date because dates reassure them. I have never disputed it. Institutions, like people, eventually learn that an accepted beginning is often more convenient than a truthful one.

They also believe I collect artworks.

I have allowed this misunderstanding to continue because correcting it would require a longer conversation than most visitors expect when they enter a gallery.

I have never collected artworks.

Artworks arrive after artists. They leave before them. Sometimes they return carrying different titles, different textures, different imagery. They are unreliable companions.

Artists are different.

Their biographies move faster than they do.

They cannot be hung on walls, although some have tried. They cannot be archived successfully. Fred arrived as Fred. Three exhibitions later everyone remembered him differently.

So I collect artists.

Not permanently. Permanence is a habit of museums. I merely keep them for a while, rearranging them until they begin to notice one another. Most believe they have met by coincidence. Few understand they have already occupied neighbouring shelves in my collection for months before they introduced themselves.

Artists are admitted according to regulations that nobody has managed to locate. The regulations are available upon request. Nobody has yet discovered how to make the request. Occasionally an artist disappears. Visitors assume this is unfortunate. 

It is usually administrative.

An empty wall is often mistaken for absence when in fact it is merely waiting for another identity to arrive.

My collection is never complete.

Completion would require certainty, and certainty has always struck me as a rather provincial ambition.
I have found that artists resemble books.

No, that is inaccurate.

Books remain where they are placed.

Artists insist on moving themselves.

This makes cataloguing difficult.

Fortunately I have become rather good at losing things. It reassures the artists. They dislike galleries that never misplace anyone.

Some artists remain with me for years.

Others visit only briefly before wandering into another institution where they become someone else entirely.
I do not prevent this.

To imprison an artist inside a single identity would be a poor form of collecting.

Recently I found myself becoming restless.

Not because my collection had grown too large, although it has.

Not because I was becoming too small, although that may also be true.

The building in which I currently reside has begun receiving letters addressed to its future.
They are polite letters of a future that might not happen.

Buildings generally receive polite letters shortly before unpleasant things happen to them.
I have read them all.

None of them was addressed to me.

It occurred to me that if I was expected to disappear, I should first become something else.
Not another gallery.

That would have been unimaginative.

I became a bar, a beach bar. Or perhaps I merely stopped pretending to be anything else.

That being said the decision surprised no one more than myself I believe it happened in Spoons. Although memory has become unreliable since becoming an institution.

Visitors now arrive asking for exhibitions and leave carrying cocktails.

Others ask for cocktails and accidentally encounter artists.

The distinction has become increasingly difficult to maintain.

There are mornings when I suspect I have always been a beach bar and merely experienced a brief period as a gallery. 

There are afternoons when I dream I am a beach bar but wake up being a gallery. 

There are evenings when I remember exhibitions that never happened but whose visitors I recall perfectly. 
There are nights where I feel nostalgic of a time before I existed.

I sometimes wonder whether the artists belong to me or whether I belong to them.

They continue producing work.

I continue collecting them.

Between these two activities a summer has appeared.

I am still here

Until rearranged otherwise

I am still here