Wall-to-Wall: Galerina, London

In Bloomsbury, framed by the street-facing windows at the corner of Guilford St, are the backs of Niina Ulfsak, Mischa Lustin and Christina Hjortlund, sat tapping at their laptops. The scene is an office setup, but its voyeuristic nature reads more like an installation – an entryway befitting the name of its occupant: Galerina. It also, as Lustin points out in mock despondence, inhibits both bad posture and looking at “stupid stuff” online.

In actuality, the gallerinas-on-display are probably the most straightforward aspect of Galerina, which was once the office of an estate agent. Nowadays, it is less of a white cube and more of a white polygon: all slanted walls and wall-maximising crevices.

Unusual spaces have been a throughline throughout Galerina’s operations. Founded in 2022, it initially existed within Ulfsak and Lustin’s bedroom in a Homerton estate. The team’s next space was again their home: a Walter Segal self-build, the product of a 1980s housing project with its roots in socialist architecture.

Galerina decided to move to a permanent base, which opened in February of this year, out of necessity. As their collaborators’ careers developed and their programme became more known, it became less feasible to host openings on a laissez-faire basis and broadcast a home address to an expanding audience.

Galerina, Guilford St floorplan, 2026. Courtesy Kamran Nayyer

“In terms of how the commercial art market works, there wasn’t really a space carved out for experimental and nomadic spaces like ours,” Ulfsak says over a video call from Switzerland, where the gallery has just presented their inaugural booth at Basel’s Liste Art Fair. “You can’t do fairs if you don’t have an address. In terms of selling work, it was hard to get people to our home; for collectors, it was an undefined space. It almost gets to the point where you either have to choose: become a nonprofit, or open as a commercial gallery.”

Galerina missed the boom of emerging galleries taking advantage of Covid-era empty commercial units and low rents, which made the process of settling much harder. Their current Bloomsbury site is nestled within a cluster of other contemporary spaces (The Perimeter is a <1 minute walk away). When they came across it, they felt a sense of serendipity. Much like the illustrious histories of Galerina’s former sites, Guilford Street is steeped in artistic predecessors. The sculptor Sarah Staton had a nineties project space and squat down the road (the subject of a 2017 exhibition at the nearby Horse Hospital). During the renovation process, the group was visited by the likes of artists Stuart McKenzie and Dan Mitchell, both of whom frequented the area in its heyday.

The current space was designed with the help of Galerina’s architect friend Kamran Nayyer, who countered the vast sterility of the white cube with ostensibly taboo gallery design features: diagonal walls and claustrophobic, hidden spaces. Once the keys were in hand, the whole thing came together in two months. “When you’re looking for a space, you can’t really plan shows,” Lustin tells me. “And, from the moment you get your keys, you start paying for it, so you don’t have much time at all. It was really impressive to see how the space materialised, and in literally a month and a half, the show was open, people were in, and the (expensive) lights were on.”

Gretchen Lawrence & Margaret Tashkova, My Spiral, 2022 (installation view, Galerina, London – Homerton). Courtesy the artists and Galerina, London

Artists each have their own ways of navigating the awkwardness of the floorplan. In a previous solo exhibition titled Resort, warehouse and the nation state, vast, ghostly Dibond prints by Vivienne Tétaz were hung diagonally to confront and reflect each other. The gallery’s current show, a duo exhibition of work by Mariann Metsis and Liina Siib, features small photographic prints by the latter hung at the end of a corridor-like protrusion. Their placement was a calculated encouragement for visitors to experience a sense of intimacy with these strikingly understated images of domesticity, which have rarely been shown since their appearance in the Estonian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale fifteen years ago.

These full-circle moments reveal a programme carving an identifiable taste shaped by the community surrounding it. At Liste, Galerina presented scupltures by Gretchen Lawrence & Margaret Tashkova, a multidisciplinary artist whose work is concerned with the influence of post-Soviet capitalism, and who had also been in the gallery’s inaugural show in Homerton. They also showed work by McKenzie, whose interdisciplinary practice has grown out of his experiences of London’s queer scene and squatting during Thatcherite Britain, and who participated in 1 Guilford St’s first show.

Sarah Staton, The Masses, 2024 (installation view, Galerina, London – Segal House). Photo: Andy Keats. Courtesy the artist and Galerina, London

Later this year, Galerina will participate in Frieze London for the first time. Their booth will include work by Polish artist Ewa Poniatowska, and will also introduce various new artists to the programme, like Slade-graduate Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King and New York-based DeSe Escobar.

The excitement of the possibilities opened by Galerina’s new home still hasn’t worn off. “There are so many amazing people we want to work with, and not enough weeks in the year,” they tell me. “And, as we’re getting more into the rhythm of the gallery and more familiar with the new space, more time is opening up for more collaborations and fun parties again – we’ve always done things in London on the side.” There are two or three galleries owned by good friends in the immediate vicinity, and another has just moved down the road. “Our dream is to have a street party,” they say.