Coventry Biennial was founded in 2017 with a focus on the social, political and critical, and has since evolved through conversations with the shifting fortunes of the city it is based in, shaping its approach from an artist-led project to a programme formed through international partnerships. The 2019 Biennial celebrated the model of Twinned Cities, originated by Coventry and Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) in 1944. The impact of this act of civic solidarity is present in the fabric of the city from the subterranean site of concrete imaginings that is Volgograd Place (a public square underneath a north eastern section of Coventry’s ring road) to the presentation of a box of bloodied earth taken from a World War Two-era mass grave in Stalingrad, to the Coventry City Trades Council in 1969 (during the height of the Cold War). This symbolic gift, currently displayed in Herbert’s ‘Peace and Reconciliation’ gallery, holds new resonance as Coventry City Council suspended the twinning in 2022 over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As Coventry’s former city centre IKEA store is redeveloped into The City Centre Cultural Gateway, it is an apt moment for the Biennial to turn its focus to the roles and functions of collecting. Obsessions, Possessions takes place at Herbert Art Gallery & Museum with four key exhibitions co-commissioned with The British Council and Arts Council Collection. Curators and writers E.N. Mirembe and Rosie Olang’ Odhiambo respond to The British Council’s collection at a point when it is in flux and between places with a new iteration of their project in transit under another sky. Artist Simeon Barclay has curated the exhibition Kinda Blu with works from Arts Council Collection that respond to ways place Coventry holds in our National psyche. Also at the Herbert are Finnish artist Sophia Ehrnrooth’s 879 Heroes by Heart and Leah Gordon’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasant (commissioned by Meadow Arts) – the exhibitions in the museum forming an entry point to the programme taking place across the city.
Objects are active agents whose meanings evolve (as with the box of Stalingrad earth). Forming an introduction to the curated events for the Biennial (while sitting outside it) is Herbert’s own call for expansion and inclusion in collecting. In the hallway that leads to the exhibition, wall panels invite visitors to have their say about their city ‘in their museum’ and to share ‘what stories could be told within it’. Shipping crates and vitrines present the ephemera the city has generated in response. A necklace made from watch backplates, a beech leaf collected in 1994, and a Pacific Star medal from 1945 sit alongside a handbook for volunteer ‘City Hosts’ from 2022, the year in which Coventry was the UK City of Culture. The staging of the museum’s questions in the hallway drives home the feel of the Biennial being a guest even after its fifth iteration at the Herbert. Access is at the heart of civic space and there is much worth for both the Herbert and Coventry Biennial to consider how they could actively work to connect their mutual concerns into a shared offer for visitors, especially given the subject of this Biennial.
There is a palpable sense of the ways in which dialogue and shared research have built the exchanges between works within in transit under another sky, curated by Mirembe and Odhiambo. Their exhibition uses the transfer of The British Council Collection from London to Coventry to open out questions of movement, migration and belonging in a place outside the centre. The title of the exhibition; drawing on writer Yvonne Vera’s thoughts on displacement and creating work while living on the margins, is a recognition of the breadth of Vera’s curatorial practice, with previous iterations of the project unfolding in cities as diverse as Kampala, Nairobi and London.
A free-standing set of boards presents a lithograph of Aubrey Beardsley’s Savoy magazine next to a series of four framed posters by the See Red Women’s Workshop. You can take copies of posters with you; the copies sit on the floor as ideas ready for further distribution in the world. On the other side of the board is a rich contextualisation of Vera’s life presented as a zine that explores the work she undertook as the first black Director of the Bulawayo National Gallery in Zimbabwe. Vera sought to recontextualise the views of local people who described the gallery as a ‘colonial hotel’ – through the long-term creation of a garden and other direct invitations to be active within the institutional space.
Elsewhere within the exhibition photographs dated between 1936 and 2005 frame the geopolitics of cause and effect that connect everyday life across continents. Derek Boshier’s ‘Routes – 1 Llangadfan, Wales, Routes – 2 Byker Newcastle & Routes – 3 Victoria BC, Canada’ (1975) present a series of long strips of faded, round edged domestic photographs that document routes taken by the artist whilst walking in those places. The known unknowns of the past are present in these works, overlapping images of corner shops hold adverts for Benson & Hedges next to neatly curtained terraces, detritus on the pavement, rocks and pathways and a betting shop called Kindness Bros. Boshier’s works share space with Suki Dhandra’s ‘Untitled’ series (2002) that documents young British South Asian women at a moment when islamophobia intensified after September 11 2001. These works speak directly to the present moment.
There is an undeniable density across the Biennial’s exhibition programme at the Herbert; the sheer volume of work, interpretation and exhibitions are rich with content that calls for time, immersion and unpacking. I returned to the gallery a number of times to see the programme in different contexts: filled with children’s voices during a school visit and also while deserted. As Cerith Wyn Evans’ work ‘Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1968 (Revised), from ‘M’ writings ’67-’72 by John Cage’, (2003) was waiting to be reset, a couple stood in front of the work puzzled about why their friend had recommended it to them. Other visitors were present to engage specifically with the Biennial. These moments underpin the value in presenting contemporary art in museum contexts and the Biennial’s ongoing work with the Herbert (and its high visitor numbers of around 350,000 annually) strengthens the position of contemporary art in the region through making it accessible to wider publics. How exhibitions communicate themselves has nuance beyond the language that drives culture and regeneration, present in the Biennial’s density of interpretation panels. I wonder how the questions asked in this year’s Coventry Biennial could be better presented to the school and college students passing through, alongside the more seasoned exhibition visitor? This is why the approach Simeon Barclay has taken is important; it holds up to the scrutiny of why now and why in this city? Within Kinda Blu; Barclay has resolved many of the questions that are present throughout the other presentations at Herbert. His exhibition explores how the nature and narratives of Coventry can open out an articulation of working-class life.
Richard Deacon’s ceramic sculpture ’Kind of Blue’ (2001) frames the entrance to the exhibition, a physical manifestation of the references Barclay uses to tease out the associations Coventry holds in our collective psyche. Deacon’s ceramic citation of Miles Davis’s use of modality as a framework for improvisation is a layer that sits alongside Barclay’s own references to television broadcasts of the ‘jubilant blue tide’ of Coventry City’s 1987 FA Cup victory and the sonics of vacated space in the Specials’ 1981 song Ghost Town. Layers, objects and references are at play here. Deacon’s first large-scale permanent work, ’Let’s Not Be Stupid’ (1991) was itself also installed in Coventry at the University of Warwick after five years of development, another loose abstraction in public space.
Barclay highlights television’s historic role as a tool for self-education in working-class homes, contrasting it with today’s atomised, algorithm-driven media. I found myself thinking back to how television could hold the pedagogical and experimental: Raven Row’s 2023 exhibition People Make Television, the late-night Open University broadcasts of Professor Stuart Hall on Marxist Models, how Channel 4’s 1982 Workshop Declaration resulted in the national broadcast of documentaries made in the regions: Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs in 1986 and the Derry Film and Video Collective’s Mother Ireland made in 1988 (which was censored from broadcast until 1991).
Other film works present in Kinda Blu draw complexity from the present. On a monitor, Duncan Campbell’s ‘Falls Burns Malone Fiddles’ (2004) screens documentary images of working-class lives drawn from the Belfast Archives. The images are accompanied by a fragmented narrative performed by actor Ewen Bremner that makes the images opaque and increasingly resistant to comprehension. We also see Bedwyr Williams’ film ‘ECHT’ (2014), in which human lives and habits reform as sticky as chewing gum post a major apocalyptic event. Nearby, Wyn Evans’ crystal chandelier switches on and off to communicate John Cages M: Writings, this text and code relayed on a monitor.
Conor Rogers’ three miniature paintings on betting slips, each individually titled: ‘To see a man about a dog’, ‘Fuck Sake’ and ‘Wedge it in!’ (all 2019) present jewel-like personal recollections on throwaway ephemera. Sharing space with Roger’s work is Claudette Johnson’s ‘Trilogy (Part Three) Woman in Red’ (1986), a monumental portrait of a Black British woman looking out of the frame made as the concluding part of her ‘Trilogy’ series that began in 1982 at her Degree Show at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. Jesse Darling’s ‘Brazen Serpent’ (2018) transforms a mobility aid into a totemic serpentine object that speaks to resistance and fragility, forming bonds with Nicole Wermers’ ‘Reclining Female #3’ (2022) sat opposite, that holds aloft a reclining female figure on a housekeeping trolley surrounded by folded laundry, plastic bags and cleaning fluids. This elevation of the everyday, the unseen service economy of work and labour rewrites (as with Claudette Johnson) the passive traditions of the female figure. Central to really understanding the power of Kinda Blu is Sophie Michael’s ‘The Watershow Extravaganza’ (2016) a film shot on 16mm that is overlayered and collaged. The work, presented for the Biennial in a shadowly alcove, was filmed at Watermouth Castle theme park in North Devon prior to its annual service. Comprising Michael’s footage of a woozy, watery light show staged in Watermouth’s miniature theatre, a 1920s ‘Mighty Mortier Organ’ accompanies the neon illuminated optics of jets of water from a display first exhibited at the 1951 Festival of Britain. There is a disquiet between image and sound which leaks out into the wider exhibition. A fever dream of sodden nostalgia and national identity; throngs of Union Jack flags are raised as a finale to this wheezy, watery theatrics. After our own summer of contentious ‘flagging’ on the region’s streets, this work speaks urgently to our present moment in ways that are uncanny and vitally needed. in transit under another sky and Kinda Blu show that the power of works in collections is in realising skillful dialogues with the present. Both exhibitions deserve more space than they have available and share a density of interpretation that can counter the flow of the works they present, yet as exhibitions in themselves they underpin why contemporary art in museums is transformative, offering the Biennial and museum compelling reasons to continue to deepen their partnership.
Coventry Biennial, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, 3 October 2025 – 25 January 2026.
Cathy Wade is an artist and writer based in Birmingham.
This review is supported by Coventry Biennial.
Published 21.01.2026 by Kevin Hunt in Reviews
2,065 words