For Moniker's 2019 Installation Hall, we have partnered with Urban Nation Museum and the museum's Executive Creative Director, Yasha Young to present a ground breaking and immersive exhibition that focuses on UK based artists' response to Brexit.

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" Nothing focuses the mind more than a crisis. For all of the meta meanings, existential experiences and intangible intrigues of the new contemporary art world, it is at its most powerful when acting as a counterpoint and protest against injustice. It has become impossible to ignore Brexit, and specifically impossible to avoid thinking about the damage it is already doing by creating borders, in the minds of the public as much as anything physical. At a time when bigger global challenges require unity and a breaking down of barriers, regression feels all the more painful.

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That’s particularly the case within the art world, where collaboration and community sits at the core of what we do, who we are, and how we create. Borders are anathema to us, a restriction and suffocation of a creativity that we have worked hard to build. It is why for my curation of the installation hall I have been moved to ask the artists what Brexit is to them: how it feels as an idea, where it hits hardest, which impulsive reactions it triggers. The results, as you’ll see moving between the works, are breathtaking and notably manifold in sentiment as well as style.

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Whether it be a literal unbalancing of firm ground, a funereal floral display of faded glory, or the unmasking of ruling classes treating the debasement of European goodwill as a game, each artist has rendered their anger, disappointment, apprehension and weariness in art that demands attention, stirs the blood and forces us to ask difficult questions of ourselves and those that lead the country.

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As societal divisions are wielded as campaign tools and the blame game becomes increasingly vicious, art must not only be protected, but must hold itself to ever higher standards in reinforcing aspects of community, unity and a refusal to acknowledge the tyranny of borders. In supporting Moniker and the artists working within the fair, you are contributing to that cause. Thank you for that, and I hope you enjoy the installations this year." 

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Yasha Young

Curator