It’s freshers’ week in Coventry. A student chamber choir is playing outside Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery as I arrive – an unintended but serendipitous entry to the British Art Show 10. The unexpected collisions of sounds, images and media continue throughout the three-venue, 37-artist strong exhibition curated by Ekow Eshun.
The British Art Show is an unwieldy thing. The UK’s largest recurring contemporary art exhibition, the quinquennial survey of British art’s inaugural edition took place in Sheffield in 1979 – 112 artists were shown, including Frank Bowling, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. It is intended as a survey of British art now – all the works were made in the last five years, and all the artists are identified as British. What constitutes British, and what British art actually means, are both knotty questions in the current political context.
Recognising this fundamental problem in this show’s premise, Eshun’s starting point is the speech given to a rioting anti-immigration crowd by a fictionalised Thomas More four centuries ago. The show’s title, A Chorus of Strangers, is lifted from a collaborative play attributed in part to Shakespeare, in which the under-sheriff of London implores the crowd to put themselves in the place of “the wretched strangers, / Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, / Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation.”
This idea is knitted through this sprawling show – a call for empathy, to embrace difference. Each artwork evokes the messy fabric of this island: there are migrant stories melded to memes, uncanny artefacts and anthropomorphic architecture, images of protest, collapse, transcendence and regeneration.
The chorus is sometimes mellifluous, sometimes cacophonous. The Mead Gallery is mostly dedicated to paintings and has the hazy ambience of a dream where images slip and meaning evades you: Matthew Krishanu’s rhapsodic paintings depict the artist and his brother in Bangladesh, their tiny bodies almost swallowed by the lushness of the landscape. Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s mixed media works similarly collapse past into present, here into there with references to Shona cosmology, Christianity, Afrofuturism and magical realism in large-scale collages of found and personal photographs and painted figures. In the next room, there are paintings by Louise Giovanelli of ecstatic and erotic experience, shown with an army of anthropomorphic vessels by Shawanda Corbett.
It’s easy to get lost in these speculative, sublime images of strangeness. Meanwhile, at the Delia Derbyshire Building at Coventry University, the next venue for the show and the best of the three, the language is more industrial and direct. Two massive works by Hannah Perry take over a whole space of their own, including the vibrating, curving Rage Fluids, made with her metalworker dad, a car body wrap stretched and undulating on steel frames, which throbs with mechanical bass sounds. It makes me think of the mechanisms and vibrations that force our bodies to bend to try to fit into space, to conform to shape.
Though giant in size, you may not notice Jasleen Kaur’s mighty new commission, Peace and. It’s an installation in several parts that merges with the building’s architecture, and points to Coventry’s role in peace and reconciliation after the blitz. The centrepiece is a sculpture made of scaffolding needles – used to stabilise buildings on the brink of collapse. It asks who needs holding, what is collapsing – and what comes with peace.
Liz Johnson Artur has a whole room here, too, an installation that reconfigures her own archives and those of others, from nightclubs and dances, streets and home, threading them through notebooks and pieces of fabric, treating them as totems and sculptures, making the othered and strange – subcultures, Blackness, queerness – feel familiar and close.
The city’s final venue is the fusty Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, where the voices of protest suggested in More’s speech rise again. The space is bookended by two sound-based works, the beautiful music of Osman Yousefzada’s Domestic Orchestra calling across the space to the elegiac vocal refrain preserved in Julianknxx’s Shifting / Spirit / Time. Both works preserve histories of colonialism and migration in music and song; both evoke the way the emotion of the entire universe can be held and expressed in a note.
In between, there are photographs and moving images of surveillance and protest by Mahtab Hussain and Guy Gunaratne, and Joy Gerrard; but just as it gets more direct and the fire is lit, the show pivots again, to the glittering copper-threaded totems of Shiraz Bayjoo, into Emma McNally’s giant crumpled paper installation The Earth is Knot Flat, once a pseudo-scientific drawing, a playful undoing of the desire to map things and rationalise our surroundings.
Then you’re out into a weird deconstructed reimagining of the British urban high street: Jesse Darling’s vitrines of slowly decaying shop-bought bouquets; Alvaro Barrington’s installations of shop shutters on top of a wallpaper of memes and Okiki Akinfe’s paintings of plantain and foxes. These works don’t sit comfortably together. They’re singing in different keys. But I think that’s the beauty of this show. A case for strangers, and strangeness.
I don’t like all the art, of course, and no one will, but I like seeing things together that shouldn’t go together. Curating should be wilder and bolder in this way more often, drawing on dissonance not affinities. Eshun has put his distinctive stamp on this hefty institution and he gives you an unpredictable experience that rejects a single definition of what British art might mean or look like. It’s a joyful rebellion against the homogeneous. And, if it can be defined as anything at all, that’s what I’d like to think Britain is.
