What’s it like to live in an art gallery?

“People are weirded out by the fact we live here.” Izzy Bilkus speaks to Final Hot Desert founders Marina Moro and Ben Anderson who run a gallery from their flat

Marina Moro and Ben Anderson photographed for Plaster by Evan Purdy

It’s New Year’s Eve 2024. As Marina Moro and Ben Anderson haul their belongings into their new flat, parties erupt throughout the building. From the balconies, suited figures sip champagne while, inside their own flat, sawdust from hastily built gallery units and dismantled radiators coats the floors. Final Hot Desert is moving in – not just the gallery, but the life and home of its founders. “We have a tendency towards chaotic moves,” Ben admits. “We decided to go ahead with an exhibition here right away. It put a timer on us. We do that kind of stuff all the time.” This is how FHD operates: as an ever-evolving entity, “built to go wherever we go,” Marina adds. Originally founded by Ben in the Utah desert in 2018 as an off-site, roaming gallery, their new Haggerton home doubles as a gallery space. It seems FHD has gradually sunk its roots into London (for now).

The gallery-flat model has an interesting history in London. “Maureen Paley opened her first gallery in the front room of her house in the ‘80s,” Marina tells me. “It’s funny because one of the only shows from that period that I’ve been able to find online was a Wolfgang Tillmans show. The space looked just like our old flat in North London with these two great arches. And Cabinet gallery in Vauxhall began in a little flat as well.” With the city’s blistering rental markets, the future for arts spaces and studios looks grim. Could FHD’s model be a solution? “I don’t think our programme would look like this if we were in a commercial space,” Marina continues. “We have no overheads, which gives us so much freedom to show a range of things that we would have probably had to cut the wings off a bit if we had to pay like two grand a month in rent in addition to our home.” The couple previously had a studio in London Fields, but had to stop renting to make this move possible. “It’s the places you go and the life you live that creates the parameters through which something can be honest and true. And in our opinion, that’s where the best art comes from.”

Final Hot Desert founders Marina Moro and Ben Anderson photographed in their Haggerston gallery flat by Evan Purdy
Ben originally founded FHD in the Utah desert in 2018 as an off-site, roaming gallery

The couple previously ran FHD in London from a smaller flat in Finsbury Park. “There can be some conflict of space with this way of working and living,” Marina admits. “In our old space, everything was shoved under the bed. We still haven’t figured out where to put our clothes here, they’re all hidden in the bathroom! But we’ve never had an issue with it. Even the ability to share our space with artists – because it’s always towards a common goal or a finite moment – it just feels right.” Marina and Ben found their way to the arts in different ways. Marina has lived in London for a decade, working various jobs in the art world. “I used to work for a blue-chip art advisor, I’ve worked in artists studios and galleries. I’ve always been on the industry side of things,” she tells me. “Whereas I never got a degree and worked in warehouses,” Ben says. “Coming together merged both of our backgrounds into FHD. We have the same values, just different starting points,” says Marina.

As with some of the best ideas, Ben’s impulse to create FHD sprung out of restlessness. “I didn’t want to stay in Utah forever, but I also didn’t know where I wanted to go,” he explains. “I started it with the ability to move. Back then, it was one of the only off-site galleries that was really active online, at least in my community.” Ben explained that because of the desert setting, people would project political or environmental messages onto the works – but for him, it was simply rooted in convenience and freedom. Marina, who joined Ben and FHD after meeting in Berlin, was mesmerised by the Utah desert. “The landscapes are so unique. My mind was blown when I first went there. It was gorgeous. And, of course, there’s a history of land art there, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.”

Leaving behind the sublime vastness of the Utah Salt Flats to a single bedroom flat in North London was a major shift. So what made them change things up? “We fell in love! Our life took us to a place where we got married and just knew the next step was very clearly London,” Marina explains. “We tried LA, but I hated it,” says Ben. “I always imagined that’s where we’d end up, but after living in London for a bit, it was clear we belonged here. We’ve been watching the art scene here for a while. After Brexit, a lot of middle galleries were wiped out. A huge gap has been left between the blue chips and the smaller galleries. We felt we could fill that gap, be kind of unknown here, but also able to rely on our experience to set ourselves up.” And there’s no question as to whether they’ve achieved that. FHD’s exhibiting artists range from up-and-coming talents like Pol Wah Tse and Nat Faulkner to well-known names like Nicholas Campbell and hosting shows at Sadie Coles’ The Shop. Their buzzing openings have been known to end late into the night, where they’ve occasionally had to kick people out.

Final Hot Desert founders Marina Moro and Ben Anderson photographed in their Haggerston gallery flat by Evan Purdy
The couple now run the gallery from their flat in Haggerston
Final Hot Desert founders Marina Moro and Ben Anderson photographed in their Haggerston gallery flat by Evan Purdy
"Final Hot Desert is built to go wherever we go.”

FHD’s lofty walls tower over you, but unlike the stark white cubes of commercial spaces, it’s a place that feels warm and friendly. You gladly offer to take your shoes off when you enter, like you’re visiting a family member’s house you don’t want to muddy the carpets of. Their furniture is relics from past shows, they wake up next to paintings. It’s a strange kind of work-life balance, but they wouldn’t have it any other way. “There’s no separation,” Marina reflects. “We’re married, we’re co-workers, and we work in the space that we live in. We occasionally make art together and have these small duo exhibitions. Everything is so intertwined. It feels really good.”

But what about the question on everyone’s lips: how does it work? Despite its roots in the non-commercial and DIY ethos, FHD has evolved into something sustainable. “It’s everyone’s favourite question to ask,” says Marina. “In the beginning, it was completely commercially unviable. It was funded by grants from European countries and Ben’s wages from Amazon.” Now, their collector base has expanded, composed of supporters who followed the gallery’s journey from Utah to London. Moving into their current space, with its clean white walls and Kunsthalle-esque window, marked a shift. “For the first time, FHD is commercially viable,” Marina explains. “And funnily enough, we’ve not had any weird experiences. I hear more stories about weird experiences from gallerists and commercial spaces. In here there’s a respect, people clean up after themselves. If anything, they’re the ones weirded out by the fact we live here.”

In here there’s a respect, people clean up after themselves. If anything, they’re the ones weirded out by the fact we live here.

Final Hot Desert founders Marina Moro and Ben Anderson photographed in their Haggerston gallery flat by Evan Purdy
The couple previously ran FHD in London from a smaller flat in Finsbury Park

Unlike traditional galleries, which can approach exhibitions with a transactional detachment, FHD operates with deep trust and openness to risk-taking. “It’s what makes it fun. We never choose an artist just because they fit a certain aesthetic,” Marina says. “It’s much more about the individual practice and its trajectory.” For their artists, they offer an intimate and collaborative environment. “We have this way of working where, because we show so many international artists, they come to London and spend anywhere from two weeks to two months living with us to produce the exhibitions on site,” Marina explains. “Because we take so long to develop the shows, we become best friends with all the artists we work with. The criteria for showing here is that we’re good friends, because otherwise it doesn’t work.”

“Currently we wake up and look at the big painting upstairs. It’s kind of bizarre to wake up to. But we’ve found that the best thing for our relationship and our marriage is that we love to do this,” says Ben “Our favourite things to do are to work on conceptualising shows or making art back-to back for hours without speaking and then coming together and sharing it all.”

The story behind the gallery’s name is a “strangely mystic thing,” says Ben, as he brings a large book titled Final Hot Desert over to where we’re sitting. “The name obviously made a lot of sense to people when we were in the desert. It’s the final report on the hot desert grazing management system from a historical bookstore in Utah. It’s essentially a manual about how to move through the desert and use it – in this case for livestock without depleting it. It’s an informational story on how to live and collaborate with the desert, which has its own parameters on how to exist. So of course, there’s this direct connection between this and off-site exhibitions. Everywhere you go there are different rules. Could the off-site shows we’ve done in the desert ever work in London? We don’t think so.”

The Final Hot Desert grazing management book Ben Anderson bought in Utah, photographed by Evan Purdy
With London’s blistering rental markets, could FHD’s model be a solution?

Despite their city roots, the way FHD operates is heavily informed by Ben’s life in the desert. “Almost all of my favourite artists live in big cities but aren’t necessarily making work about the city,” he says. “I think the greatest artists focus on where this feeling of oversaturation comes from, which is a completely different way of thinking to what I was used to before moving here. I’ve also noticed that ideas about spirituality in the desert are completely different to anyone’s idea of spirituality here. People look for fairies in crevices here and that doesn’t compute for me, like, no, god is a giant sun over the desert kind of thing, you know?” “It’s completely different,” Marina adds. “That vastness doesn’t exist in the UK.”

At its heart, FHD is more than a gallery, it’s an experiment in living, a place of constant reinvention. “We’ve had this goal since moving to London,” Ben shares, “that if an artist was known for something, they would do something completely different for our show. When people research an artist’s archive of shows, we want to be the space where they had a weird show that told you something new about them.” It’s a project that exists at the intersection of home and institution, where artists and exhibitions aren’t just hosted, but are born from deep friendships and embedded in the fabric of Marina and Ben’s daily lives, in a way that, as they describe, “just makes sense.”

Information

'Teen' by David Muenzer is on view at Final Hot Desert by appointment until 23rd February 2025.

finalhotdesert.co.uk

Credits
Words:Izzy Bilkus
Photography:Evan Purdy

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