This exhibition brings together a group of under-represented London-based artists, highlighting the depth of creative work that exists at a grassroots level across the city.

These are artists making ambitious, committed work, often without consistent access to the walls, spaces and platforms through which contemporary art is traditionally encountered.

Positioned between two of London’s most significant art fairs, where works of considerable cultural and financial value are presented, we stand outside holding our own work. The gesture is deliberately simple. Without walls, booths or conventional exhibition architecture, the artists themselves become the structure of the exhibition. There is an intentional contrast between the extraordinary concentration of the international art market inside the tents and the artists standing beyond them.

Our works may carry very different price points, but their artistic value, ambition and relevance are not determined by the scale of the market surrounding them.

The exhibition asks where value begins in contemporary art, and how artists become visible within an increasingly complex cultural landscape. At a moment when galleries, artists and institutions alike are navigating significant economic pressures and changes in how art is discovered, exhibited and collected, there is an opportunity to consider new ways of creating visibility and building relationships between artists, audiences, curators and galleries.

Rather than rejecting the existing gallery system, this exhibition seeks to expand the conversation around it. Galleries remain vital advocates for artists, providing context, support and opportunities for practices to develop over time. But important artistic activity also takes place beyond established

structures, and sometimes artists must create their own opportunities to bring that work into view.

These artists continue to make because their practices demand it. They work through the financial and practical realities of sustaining an artistic practice in London today, committing time, labour and

resources to works without knowing where, when, or even whether those works will eventually be

exhibited.

There is something important in that persistence. Work is made before there is a buyer, before there is a wall and before there is an invitation.

This exhibition makes that usually unseen position visible.

For this moment, we become our own walls.

We stand with our work.