Jonny Tanna, founder of northwest London’s Harlesden High Street, doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d open a gallery in Mayfair, the tony neighborhood home to the megas and blue-chips of the world. Wedged between a chicken shop and a minicab office, Harlesden High Street has gained a reputation as one of the most unvarnished, sincere, and exciting galleries in the British capital. The rule there is simple: it only shows artists of color. It’s a space that feels lived in, loved, and profoundly local. So, when word spread that Harlesden High Street was moving into Mayfair during Frieze Week, the line was that Tanna had sold out.
Related Articles
He hasn’t.
The “Harlesden High Street in Mayfair” project is less a relocation than an open-ended pop-up. On Monday, the Düsseldorf- and Berlin-based gallery Setareh will open its new London location on Bourdon Street with “Forces of Nature,” a show presented in collaboration with Harlesden and cultural strategist Trinidad Fombella.
“It’s not about suddenly becoming a Mayfair gallery,” Tanna told me over the phone. “It’s about keeping quality high without getting trapped in the commercial cycle. We only do a few selling shows a year, so this gives me the chance to reach people without compromising the program.”
“Forces of Nature” pairs two London-based artists, Abbas Zahedi and Jamiu Agboke, who work, respectively, in conceptual installation and atmospheric painting. Zahedi’s 11&9 is a filing-cabinet-turned-archive filled with “biographical records” that visitors can swap out for personal objects—a meditation on bureaucracy, migration, and memory. Agboke’s reflective landscapes, painted on aluminum and copper, drift between Lagos and the English countryside, both familiar and dreamlike.
Tanna first met Agboke at the Royal Drawing School. “He paints like a middle-class, middle-aged white man,” Tanna said, laughing. “And he behaves like one too—always in a blazer, very dapper.” Zahedi, meanwhile, is a longtime friend from the neighborhood, someone Tanna had “always wanted to work with.”
For all the big talk of “rebalancing” and “territorial statements” floating around this show, what really drives Tanna is something far more direct: community. His programming has always been about making art accessible—showing work that locals recognize as theirs, not something that belongs to someone else.
“If we started showing a bunch of rich white kids,” he said last year in an interview with the Face, “it would be alien to the people around here.”
The plan is for Tanna to run a few shows at Setareh’s space each year as an itinerant extension of his home base. The model is just the latest reimagining of how small galleries survive. Harlesden gets to dip its toes into a more commercial sector in Mayfair, while Setareh, a respected European gallery, can expand to London while defraying some costs and pressures of programming.
“When you get stuck doing commercial shows nonstop,” he said, “your quality dips, and you end up in debt to your own inventory. I never want that.”