The title of this year’s Coventry Biennial –the 5th outing of the festival– Obsessions, Possessions, seeks to raise questions of ownership, patronage and acquisition: questions pertinent to the present moment for artists, institutions, and the wider public sphere, both in the local context of Coventry and for the Art World at large. The theme also comes in response to Coventry’s ‘City Centre Cultural Gateway’ (CCCG), an ongoing major redevelopment of a former IKEA store that will host the permanent collections of both Arts Council and the British Council under one roof. A pair of curated group shows from each collection forms the core of the biennial at Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.
As Biennial director Ryan Hughes points out in his welcome text for the festival: “at national and international levels, collections and archives have never been so closely scrutinised and hotly contested. What is included? Who does it represent? Who decides?” A nod, in part no doubt, to the protracted wranglings of the UK government over the ownership of artifacts acquired by colonial theft (i.e. the Benin Bronzes or the Parthenon Marbles) and the manner in which such objects have been symbolically pressed into service on both sides of the debate.
These questions are at the core of the Biennial, but the focus of this review is on the satellite exhibitions across the city, where such concerns can be read with as much potency and perhaps seen most thoroughly for me in a ‘Coventry Edition’ of The Plastic Bag Museum at Coventry University’s Delia Derbyshire building. The exhibition is the first in-real-life outing of the project founded by artist Katrina Cobain in 2020, that the artist describes as ‘the institution under your kitchen sink’. At face value this project is a celebration of kitsch design, the eccentricities inherent to collecting and collectors, the ecological legacy of plastic waste, and the struggle of preserving an object that was only intended for single use. But the selection and captioning of the bags on display tells a more acute political history of Britain over the last 50 years through the frame of industry, commerce and the interplay of public and private spheres.
A bold blue and white bag declares ‘Water Works! Keep it Public’, its exclamation mark styled like an inverted water droplet. The caption tells us that the bag was made to ‘protest the Public Utility Transfers and Water Charges Act 1988, which led to the privatisation of water in England and Wales in 1989, under Margaret Thatcher’s government. Water in England and Wales still remains privatised today.’ I hardly need to point out the political currency of that moment in time and its present-day effects, with the pollution of natural watercourses one of the few issues capable of uniting scattered voices from across the UK’s political spectrum in shared outrage. This parable of privatisation, of the sale of national assets to shareholder interests, told through the medium of a carrier bag, feels almost too apt.
Elsewhere the carrier bags tell a story of the shifting status of the British High Street – long an indicator of economic prosperity in the public consciousness, where the health of the economy is understood by the number of closed and boarded-up shops in our town centres, and the changing nature of the businesses that remain viable in this context. One wall of the exhibition is dedicated to those High Street chains that have been housed in Coventry’s post-war modernist precinct, with captions highlighting the shifting fortunes of household names such as Woolworths: ‘Credit Crunch’ (2009); BHS ‘collapsed into administration’ (2016); Kwik Save ‘went into administration’ (2007), and those that remain, like Marks & Spencer.
As I’m looking at the silver and rainbow striped carrier bag of C&A (withdrew from the UK market in 2001), Man at C&A by The Specials starts playing in my head: ‘I’m the man in grey / I’m just the man at C&A / And I don’t have a say / In the war games that they play’ – with the department store chain invoked as shorthand for the status of the everyman stripped of agency by geopolitical events. It feels like a cliché to mention The Specials in a piece of writing about Coventry, but the sociopolitical atmosphere of the ‘long 1980s’ feels very present throughout the Biennial, both in terms of Two-tone as a cultural movement built upon multicultural exchange in the context of resurgent facism, and questions of the public and private ownership of objects, companies, utilities and infrastructure.
In the foyer of the Delia Derbyshire building, the exhibition an Other World is Possible (which sits within Coventry Biennial’s overriding Obsessions, Possessions theme) brings together a collection of Afghan War Rugs belonging to the artist Carlos Noronha Feio alongside a rug he has designed himself. Originating in the Soviet-Afghan war that spanned the 1980s, the rugs tell the story of a country at the crossroads of cultures whilst also caught between the influence of foreign powers. Soviet Kalashnikov rifles and US F16 fighter jets become pixels woven into the geometric pattern of the rug, missable on first glance. Feio’s rug is more legible than the existing war rugs but equally mysterious. At its centre, the Earth is emblazoned with clock hands at the 12 o’clock position, perhaps implying that our hour of reckoning has been reached, with a swarm of space shuttles zooming away from the planet as fast as they can in every direction. Whilst Afghan War Rugs began as a vernacular form of reportage and commemoration, they largely became the souvenir possessions of international soldiers, collected as novelties, in turn stoking an industry dependent on a huge amount of human labour in the act of hand-weaving.
There are echoes of this process in Mustafa Boğa’s works in the group presentation at Charterhouse’s ‘Coach House’ venue, where freeze-frames from a VHS tape of late 1980s/early 1990s family parties in the artist’s native Turkey have been intricately preserved using freehand embroidery – a process that must have taken hundreds of hours of work to complete. The zigzag stitch of the sewing machine does a good job of emulating the fuzzily encoded information, the glitching tape rendered as slashes of fluorescent green and red. In the process of keeping, preserving and making tangible these transient images, Boğa has not privileged the sentimental above the reality of the image’s degraded status – not restored or enhanced them as other acts of collecting and archiving might be prone to do.
The 1980s lingers on in Niall Singh’s exhibition The Recyclopaedia, at Art Riot Collective – an artist-run space housed in FarGo village, a BOXPARK style cluster of independent businesses, neighboured by shops selling second-hand vinyl records and vintage clothes, enacting their own form of capture, collection and re-possession of the late 20th century. Amongst Singh’s work six magpies have Maggie Thatcher heads, in a flock that hovers above the mass of collages below; seemingly ready to pick apart and strip the assets of 20th century colonial modernism. This history has been extracted in turn by the artist and a group of local participants from a stack of the complete Encyclopedia Britannica during workshops, with the project aiming to ‘replace the kinds of imperial, racist and sexist content that is often presented as so-called fact in these kinds of publications’. What these ‘so-called facts’ (as the wall panel states) have been replaced by is a chaotic admixture of fractured images and asynchronous historical events. A poll tax riot is interrupted by a giant frog and a moth. Union-Jack wavers stand atop a pyramid whose foundations include a zebra and a map of the Indian subcontinent. Human bodies are fractured at the level of the anatomical diagram and reassembled with new organs proposed. The collaboratively authored, anti-imperialist new facts that these collages propose stay true to the surrealist tradition of collage as a means of escaping conscious sense-making, but stop short of making definitive assertions of their own, instead seeming mainly to say ‘it’s complicated’.
The nature of our cultural obsessions and possessions are a battleground for sure – and in seeking to rebuild our cultural narratives, all must be up for grabs. The CCCG redevelopment project follows a trend of institutional collections turning their face to the public, through venues that are part-storeroom, part-attraction (the V&A East Storehouse, opening on London’s former Olympic park site earlier this summer is a prime example). These projects often attempt to reappraise the status of the institutional museum as the authoritative selector and organiser of our collective cultural history, instead seeking to reflect the concerns of today’s audiences through rotating, varied and somewhat jumbled displays that can feel more like the experience of shopping in a department store than visiting a museum; with a light degree of curatorial direction and a high amount of room for interpretation. We are in a moment where the artifacts of our past have been thrown into the air and are in disarray. The question is which things will be allowed back into the museum, and whether we will be able to agree what story to tell about ourselves once they are readmitted.
Obsessions, Possessions: Coventry Biennial, various venues around Coventry, 3 October 2025 – 25 January 2026.
Daniel Sean Kelly is an artist and arts worker based in Leicester, where he co-runs the artist-led gallery Two Queens.
This review is supported by Coventry Biennial.
Published 01.12.2025 by Kevin Hunt in Reviews
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