Art, writing, and culture are not, and do not need to be about entertainment and commerce, about making one’s way in society. They can be a mode of relating to each other that takes its cues from friendship, from engaging each other as separate and related people committed to each other in mutual support and protection.

Excerpt: Fred Dewey ‘a polis for new conditions’

Established by Christian Mooney in 2007, Arcade offers a programme of exhibitions and a constantly evolving platform of performances, live events, talks and publications. Through these varied formats, we aim to find new modes of presentation exploring the developments and complexities in contemporary art, across a range of practices, media and concerns. Both in London and internationally, Arcade has sought to support working artists and explore how experimental practice in the visual arts can have a vital relevance in public life.

Our new visual identity for the gallery is a comma or breath mark. This motif is borrowed from the artist Anna Barham who started using it in 2015 to implicate the audience’s breath in the reading of her work. During the several lock-downs of 2020 and 2021, it seemed also to reflect the gallery’s moment of pause and reflection, giving time to the questions ‘What is art?’ ‘What is its purpose?’ ‘What impact can it have on society’. The work and friendship of Jeremiah Day and the late Fred Dewey, have been instrumental in helping to understand how Arcade can present and begin to answer these questions.

The name ARCADE is a ready made (referencing neither Pac-Man nor Walter Benjamin) found on a street in Amsterdam in 2006 on the way to a studio visit with Jeremiah Day—the first artist approached to make an exhibition at a gallery that hadn’t yet opened.