Opening during freshers’ week in Coventry with a student chamber choir playing outside the Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery, the British Art Show 10 spans three venues and 37 artists under the curation of Ekow Eshun. The quinquennial exhibition, launched in Sheffield in 1979, surveys contemporary British art made within the last five years, confronting knotty questions surrounding national identity and belonging.
The Bottom Line
- Ekow Eshun curates the three-venue, 37-artist British Art Show 10 across Coventry locations including the Mead Gallery, the Delia Derbyshire Building, and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.
- The exhibition draws its thematic title, A Chorus of Strangers, from a collaborative play attributed in part to Shakespeare.
- Works range from Matthew Krishanu’s landscape paintings and Hannah Perry’s industrial sound installations to Jasleen Kaur’s scaffolding sculpture commissioned for the city.
A Curatorial Premise Rooted in Shakespearean Plea
Recognising the foundational problem in defining what British art actually means in the current political context, Ekow Eshun builds his starting point around a four-century-old speech given to a rioting anti-immigration crowd by a fictionalised Thomas More. The exhibition’s title, A Chorus of Strangers, lifts its name from a collaborative play attributed in part to Shakespeare. In the text, the under-sheriff of London implores a rioting anti-immigration crowd to imagine themselves in the place of displaced travellers seeking safety.
This call for empathy and the embrace of difference threads through the entire sprawling project. Migrant stories merge with internet memes, uncanny architecture, and images of protest, collapse, and regeneration. Rather than offering a singular definition, the exhibition leans into dissonance and a deliberate rejection of the homogeneous.
Contrasting Venues and Industrial Textures Across Coventry
The Mead Gallery is primarily dedicated to paintings carrying the hazy ambience of a dream. Matthew Krishanu’s rhapsodic canvases depict the artist and his brother in Bangladesh, their tiny figures dwarfed by lush landscapes. Kudzanai-Violet Hwami presents mixed-media collages blending Shona cosmology, Christianity, Afrofuturism, and magical realism, while Louise Giovanelli exhibits paintings of ecstatic and erotic experience alongside Shawanda Corbett’s anthropomorphic vessels.
At the Delia Derbyshire Building at Coventry University, the artistic language shifts to something more industrial and direct. Hannah Perry occupies a dedicated space with Rage Fluids, a curving, vibrating installation created with her metalworker dad that stretches a car body wrap across steel frames accompanied by mechanical bass sounds. Jasleen Kaur presents a mighty new commission titled Peace and., merging with the building’s architecture by utilizing scaffolding needles—structures typically used to stabilise buildings on the brink of collapse—to touch upon Coventry’s history of peace and reconciliation following the blitz.
Liz Johnson Artur commands a full room with an installation threading archives from nightclubs, streets, and homes through notebooks and fabric totems. Meanwhile, the final venue, the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, amplifies voices of protest. Osman Yousefzada’s Domestic Orchestra and Julianknxx’s Shifting / Spirit / Time use sound and vocal refrains to preserve histories of colonialism and migration across the space.
Deconstructed High Streets and Wild Curation
The exhibition winds down into a deconstructed reimagining of the British urban high street. Jesse Darling contributes vitrines filled with slowly decaying shop-bought bouquets, while Alvaro Barrington arranges shop shutters over a wallpaper of memes, accompanied by Okiki Akinfe’s paintings of plantain and foxes. These diverse works sing in entirely different keys.
By bringing together pieces that deliberately resist comfortable alignment, Ekow Eshun presents an unpredictable experience. The exhibition offers a wilder, bolder model for contemporary art curation, drawing strength from friction rather than tidy affinities.
