Creating a popup art gallery from scratch
During the first two weeks of December 2017, the Feral Horses team has ran a popup art gallery in Deptford Market Yard. Here is the story behind our crazy adventure.
The Space:
There was a time when cabbies wouldn’t even take you to Deptford for all the money in the world. Today, it is one of London’s most up-and-coming neighbourhood. The freshly refurbished arches of the Market Yard are the new homes for independent shops, restaurants and businesses such as Feral Horses’ offices. The young startup was born and bread there and its co-founders have had the chance to be inspired by the local arty community.
Deptford is changing fast, however, a few spaces are still empty at the moment. This was the case of St Paul’s House, a perfectly located 240m2 venue that could host the totality of our Regard Portfolio, a collection of 17 artworks including large scale pieces. Despite the fact that the venue was still at an early “working-site” stage, our team took up the challenge and worked hard for two weeks no-stop to turn it into an art gallery.
We love to get our hands dirty and don’t get to do much manual work while developing the Art Stock Exchange on a daily basis, so this was the perfect opportunity and as it turned out: a great team building exercise. Of course, there’s no need to mention that we had little to no experience in creating a space from scratch but it just made the entire process even more fun and the learning curve a bit longer than expected!
Try the “Startup Crash Test” on your own team: Make your team work in a venue with no power, a lot of dust, and a crazy amount of heavy manual work to do in mid November for a week. If they are happy to stay late and still love each other at the end: Bingo! Your team is indestructible.
The “Phygital” Gallery:
From day 1, we have decided to fully assume and respect the aesthetic codes of the rough venue and play with them to create coherency. If, there is a large wire that we cannot hide, no problem! Let’s neatly roll fairy lights around it. If the ceiling is made of large blocks of silver insulating material, no problem! Let’s use it to reflect the lights.
To bring balance and instantly communicate the fact that we are an art gallery in a singular space, we have added the traditional “pristine white wall” element that nicely contrasts with the roughest parts of the venue and accents the art collection beautifully.
We have curated a group show of the first 9 European contemporary Artists with the first 17 artworks that we have sold on the Art Stock Exchange. This collection is called “Regard”.
“Sometimes, a regard is just a simple look, a gaze. It can be an aspect, a point or a particular. It could be a thought, an attention or a concern. A regard could be a reference or a relation. It can also mean respect, esteem, deference. Here, it is a glimpse into our contemporaneity.”
Our 9 Feral Artists:
David Aiu Servan-Schreiber
JAGO
Matteo Cordero
Léo Caillard
Simone Fugazzotto
Raffaele Montepaone
Federico Clapis
Alessandro Calizza
Tasos Nyfadopoulos
The three key curation techniques implemented:
- The dark room: In order to break the ice, videos of the Artists working in their workshops were projected in the dark room in order to create a connection between the visitors and the artists exhibited. This technique is particularly powerful to help the least “arty” visitors enter the right state of mind to enjoy the show even with little to no art knowledge.
- The “touch me” room: Tasos Nyfadopoulos is one of the rare, if not the only artist, who makes sculptures with kevlar. Therefore, his work looks incredibly delicate but is a solid as an armour! This is why he always encourages people to touch his artworks and feel the kevlar and the fibreglass with gold incrustations.
- The Phygital Experience via NFC: One of the key challenges we had to deal with was coming up with a way to bridge the physical and the digital world and involve our online Art Stock Exchange in the physical gallery. Our solution uses the NFC technology which stands for Near Field Communication and refers to is a set of communication protocols that enable two electronic devices, one of which is usually a portable device such as a smartphone, to establish communication by bringing them within 4 cm of each other. What it means for us, is an opportunity to let our visitors access our online platform by simply tapping their phone on the artwork’s tags that are equipped with NFC stickers. It gives full access to each artwork’s info, the bio of the artists and the possibility to acquire shares in a few clicks without even downloading an app!
The Opening
The opening of the pop up gallery was a great success. We were very proud to show our feral art collection to over a 100 art, tech and finance lovers in Deptford, the place where “it all started”.
Special Thanks to:
Feral Horses is the Stock Exchange for Art. We have reached our £100,000 target and are now overfunding on equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs.
Curious? Discover our campaign here.
