Abdullahi Bashe

For our third monthly post introducing our trustees and asking them to delve into our archive, we meet Abdullahi Bashe:

Please introduce yourself, and say why you are a trustee at Matt’s Gallery:

I am a finance lawyer by background. I have a personal interest in art and I was introduced to Matt’s Gallery by an art lawyer I had worked with previously who suggested I apply to join the board. I was particularly drawn to the Gallery’s radical commitment to supporting experimental artists and work. Being a trustee over the past five years has been a great education for me not just on art but in some ways also on life.

What have you chosen from the archive and why?

From the archive I chose to look through the printed exhibition invites from Matt’s Gallery dating from the 1980s through to the late 2000s. I wanted to first take a step back and get a sense of the gallery’s evolution over the decades.

What struck me immediately was how different each invite was from the other. They necessarily reflected the historical details of the exhibitions (dates, times, place) but equally they were to me timeless in their expressiveness and works of art in their own right. Matt's Gallery’s identity as a site for radical thinking, making and showing shone through.

If I had to pick a favourite invite it would be the poster for Richard Grayson’s 2009 exhibition - his third at Matt’s - titled ‘The Golden Space City of God’, a video installation work. I was intrigued by the stills from the video installation printed onto the fold out A3 poster, the air of science fiction to it, the mystery as to what the exhibition was about and the commitment to print evidenced by the transfer of medium from digital onto print in the form of the invite. After my visit I was compelled to read more about the exhibition online in the accompanying ‘whitebook’.

This particular item for me distilled the essence of Matt’s Gallery and brought home the importance of the archive not only as a record of things past but as a living breathing conduit for conversation and discovery from the past into the future and vice versa. I Was There too via the archive.

Director’s note: In the early 2000s our invitation card, which were sent out by post, came with a perforated tear-off section with the date and time of the private view printed on them so that you could rip this off and put it in your diary. All our invitations, posters and whitebooks from that time were designed by Phil Baines.