British Art Show 10 review – a bold and brilliant exploration of who the British really are — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- British Art Show 10 opens across three Coventry venues—Mead Gallery, Delia Derbyshire Building, and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum—featuring 37 artists in a sprawling survey of contemporary British art.
- Ekow Eshun curated the exhibition around the theme A Chorus of Strangers, drawing from a fictional Thomas More speech to frame art as a call for empathy toward migrants and the marginalized.
- Matthew Krishanu and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami present dreamlike, layered paintings that merge personal and cultural histories, collapsing geography and time through references to Bangladesh, Shona cosmology, and Afrofuturism.
- Hannah Perry debuts large-scale industrial installations including Rage Fluids, a vibrating metal and car-wrap sculpture that evokes bodily constraint and mechanical force.
- Jasleen Kaur's new commission Peace and integrates into Coventry University’s architecture, using scaffolding needles to symbolize structural fragility and the city’s postwar peace legacy.
- Liz Johnson Artur transforms her photographic archives into an immersive installation that elevates Black subcultures, queerness, and everyday intimacy as sacred and familiar.
- Osman Yousefzada and Julianknxx anchor the Herbert Art Gallery with sound works preserving colonial and migrant histories through song, while Jesse Darling and Alvaro Barrington deconstruct the British high street with decaying bouquets and meme-covered shutters.
Why it matters: This exhibition reframes British identity not as fixed but as fragmented, contested, and enriched by difference—offering cultural institutions a model for embracing dissonance over consensus. The scale and decentralization of the show make it a rare national statement that gains urgency in a political climate hostile to migration and diversity.
Ask SkimNews
