UNTITLED ASSEMBLY: An open, collective occupation of the ANNEX

During this project, The Koppel Project's ANNEX gallery in Elephant & Castle will be made available to the resident artists working within their studios for Untitled Assembly, a temporary, collectively occupied exhibition.

With hundreds of artists working across a wide range of disciplines, the studios provides the context for an experiment in exhibition-making that begins with a simple proposition: what happens when artists are given access to a gallery without a prescribed theme, a selection process or a curatorial framework?

For four days, the ANNEX will function as an open space in which artists can install, alter, accumulate, remove and respond to work. Painting, sculpture, photography, moving image, sound, text, performance and other forms of practice may coexist within the gallery. Contributions can be temporary or remain throughout the project; artists may work independently or in response to one another. The exhibition will develop over time, with no fixed arrangement or predetermined outcome.

Untitled Assembly considers the conditions through which artistic work is exhibited, circulated and made visible. Within a sector in which access to space, resources and professional networks can shape an artist’s opportunities, the project temporarily suspends the conventional distinction between those selected to exhibit and those who are not.

Rather than presenting a curated representation of the building’s artistic community, this initiative makes the exhibition space itself available as a shared resource.

There will be no opening reception or private view. The public is invited to visit and encounter the gallery in whatever state it occupies. Works may appear, disappear, overlap or be replaced; documentation will record moments in the exhibition’s development without attempting to establish a definitive version.

The gallery may also be entirely empty. There is no guarantee of a particular number of participants, a minimum amount of work, or a continuous exhibition in the conventional sense. Its presence, density and activity will depend entirely on the artists who choose to take part and the decisions they make throughout the week.

Untitled Assembly resists defining in advance what the exhibition should become. An assembly may be a gathering, an arrangement of separate parts or a collective act. Here, it describes a space whose form and meaning will be determined by the artists who occupy it.

The result may be an exhibition, a conversation, an accumulation of unrelated gestures or a temporary disruption of the gallery’s usual function. Its direction remains open.