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Am I A London Artist?

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The short answer is no; the long answer is no, with a few caveats:

I'm not a London artist. I just don't think I am. I just don't fit in. I don’t commercially exhibit in London. It’s been like that for years.

For me, my Art Zimbabwe project was perhaps the best representation of London: inscrutable, tense and acontextual.

My paintings do not export the same kind of escapism as those about having a hard time under surveillance capitalism. They don’t fit in with the definition and iconography of Arcadia Misa or the lovelorn criticality perpetuated by Carlos Ishikawa.

Because curators lack such shortcuts to categorise it, my work might appear outside the marketable scenes of the last 15 years, and that's good.

On the other hand, I'm a curator, we're all curators as well now, and I don't like the way curators degrade themselves. It’s not even a social activity any more. Mainstream curators are so paranoid that they think something's got to come from a different place in order to be good.

If someone told me I couldn't leave London again it wouldn't bother me. The more you travel, the more you get away from yourself. You sometimes meet these people who have been everywhere and you sort of know they can't get themselves together. They don't know what they're on about.

I have a desire, personally and for my art, to remain free of official contexts. Like gentrification, this notion of a local scene / networked criticality is often as much an institutional incantation as it is an actual representation.