The third Coventry Biennial will take place from October 2021 until January 2022 across Coventry and Warwickshire.
Referencing the radical nature of Coventry’s history whilst also signifying a positive way forward out of the pandemic, the 2021 edition of the Biennial is titled HYPER-POSSIBLE. HYPER-POSSIBLE will see more than 50 artists (local, national and international) exhibiting in seven locations across Coventry and Warwickshire, including Coventry Cathedral, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Leamington Art Gallery & Museum, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, The Old Grammar School and a new gallery for the city, located above HMV Empire Coventry.
The Biennial will open to the public from Friday 8 October 2021. Some event tickets for Coventry Biennial are on sale now and more will be released soon.
Coventry Biennial 2021 is generously supported by Coventry City of Culture Trust.
Image: Luke Routledge, Strange Matter, Installation, 2020.
Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy of Eastside Projects.
Proof at The Old Grammar School is a significant group exhibition that responds to the venue’s history as a school, and presents new and radical approaches to education, participation, co-creation, storytelling and narrative.
HOUSE at The Hyper-Lab, a new space above the HMV Empire Coventry is a group exhibition that has a particularly strong connection to the Biennial’s Home and Other Habitats HYPER-PATH, with artists exploring our increasingly complex relationships with the places that we live and dwell in.
HYPER-POSSIBLE at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum is the largest group show of the third Coventry Biennial.
HOUSE is a group exhibition that explores our increasingly complex relationship with the places that we live and dwell in.
Several artists who are exhibiting respond to the city’s relationship to House music, the venue’s post-industrial aesthetic, it’s cinematic history and the role that the building is hoped to have in the redevelopment of City Centre South. The exhibition brings together newly commissioned projects and existing artworks, creating an opportunity to look back at what has made Coventry and the surrounding area so innovative and creative.
A tour of HYPER-POSSIBLE at The Herbert Art Gallery and The Hyper-Lab with Ryan Hughes, the Biennial’s Artistic Director.
Starting at the Herbert, a tour of HYPER-POSSIBLE and Listening to the Anthropocene at Coventry Cathedral.
30 Oct 2021 - Led by Biennial Producer Emily Gardner or Dr Michael Pigott, Coventry Biennial's Curator & Audio-Visual Director
27 Nov 2021 - Led by Dr Michael Pigott, Coventry Biennial's Curator & Audio-Visual Director
Starting at the Herbert, a tour of the HYPER-POSSIBLE exhibition and the Old Grammar School Led by Anneka French, Curator, Coventry Biennial.
This year, Coventry Biennial have commissioned Faye Claridge to co-create a project working remotely with people in prisons in the UK and US. ‘We Bear’ asks participants to create new artworks inspired by themes around the Warwickshire symbol of the chained bear. She paired two folk art paintings from the two countries, showing different treatments of captive bears. These, as metaphors, provided inspiration for participants to explore personal experiences of incarceration throughout the global pandemic.
In the 1960s Coventry was the birthplace of Art and Language, a group that challenged the status quo of art and art education. Some of their controversial observations and strategies are now seen as commonplace and common sense. Why and how did this internationally significant group start in Coventry? Can we find traces of their influence in the city today? What was their influence on art education inside and outside the city.This day event brings together people with experience of and an interest in this story rarely discussed in Coventry.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) has seemed to grow in fame (or infamy) with each passing year since its demise in 2003. For contemporary speculative realists, xenofeminists, practice-based researchers and ‘para-academic’ theorists, the group offer the kernel of a genuinely new path for 21st century philosophy and arts research, one that blurs the line between subcultural production and high theory. Yet it is arguably within the areas of sound and music that the CCRU have the most enduring influence. This symposium assesses the potentials and limits of the CCRU’s sonic theory, from jungle and the hardcore continuum through to contemporary sound art.
A sharing circle, forum of ideas and discussion around inclusivity for mothers and parents in Coventry and in the wider arts community. Contributors will include a founding member of the Mothers Who Make movement, members of the Coventry Biennial team and other invited speakers.
Children welcome. All welcome for this lively discussion on how we can plan for better access and a warmer welcome for caregivers in the arts.
Join curators Jane Simpkiss and Anneka French for a talk and tour of HYPER-POSSIBLE in Leamington.
HYPER-POSSIBLE (8 October 2021 - 6 February 2022) brings together newly commissioned projects and existing artworks from national collections, creating an opportunity to look back at what has made Coventry and the surrounding area unique, while also reflecting on an increasingly complex global situation.
Coventry Biennial 2021 x Mothers Who Make Coventry
For any kind of maker and any kind of mother/birth-giver. A chance to reflect on where we are at, and how we’re holding these two roles in an inclusive, supportive space.
Suitable for all ages
Exhibition open: Wednesday-Saturday, 10am-4pm
Presented as a part of the third Coventry Biennial, Listening to the Anthropocene at Coventry Cathedral is a major exhibition of sound and moving image artworks that explores the ways that field recording and sonic research can help attune us to the shifting state of our planet, at a range of scales.
Newly commissioned and specifically adapted artworks form an immersive sound installation in the Nave of the iconic Coventry Cathedral throughout the duration of HYPER-POSSIBLE.
International artists with relationships to locations that have been affected by climate change present artworks, creating an exhibition that explores the idea that we have moved into a new geological epoch – one that is marked by the impact of human activities on the Earth.
‘Listening to the Anthropocene’ is originally the title of a significant lecture by artist-geographer AM Kanngieser, which maps the range of recent ‘eco-acoustic practices’ used by artists and others from around the world.
Coventry Biennial is a festival of contemporary art taking place across Coventry & Warwickshire within and supported by UK City of Culture 2021. Expect new work by local and International artists, workshops, performances, talks, tours and much more.
For more information visit: www.coventrybiennial.com
Image: Ben Rivers, Look Then Below, 2019. Courtesy of Ben Rivers and LUX, London.
Opening times:
The Cathedral
Wednesday - Saturday, 10am-4pm
Due to Christmas, New Year and existing events at the Cathedral the exhibition will be closed:
14th October;
10th-25th and 27th November 2021;
1st-3rd, 11th, 15th-31st December 2021;
1st, 19th-21st January 2022 (inclusive).
Join Coventry Biennial for the opening of Proof in the beautiful Grade I listed 12th Century Grammar School, a building that is rarely open to the public.
Proof is a group exhibition that responds to the venue’s history as a school, and presents new and radical approaches to education, participation, co-creation, storytelling and narrative.
The exhibition brings together newly commissioned projects and existing artworks, creating an opportunity to look back at what has made Coventry and the surrounding area so innovative in the field of creative education and production.
A day of talks to accompany the Listening to the Anthropocene exhibition at Coventry Cathedral. Speakers will include artists from the exhibition, as well as writers and academics who are critically engaged with climate change and the concept of the ‘anthropocene’ (which suggests that we have entered a new geological age, defined by the impact of human activities on the planet). There will be a focus on how practices of listening, field recording and sound art can address these issues in useful ways.
Coventry Biennial 2021: Part of the BLK Art Group Day
An illustrated public discussion of the BLK Art Group and their legacy. Convened by Ian Sergeant, Coventry Biennial’s Curatorial Resident.
Body as Archive, Archive as Score is a research project and exhibition at Rugby Art Gallery & Museum reflecting on the local area’s dance history and legacy of artist-led networks, with a particular focus on the work of Cycles Dance Company. This exhibition acts as a starting point for a dedicated research group, bringing together practitioners who take influence from Cycles’ workshop-centric pedagogical format and who will collectively develop ideas and discussions around the role of the archive in artistic practice, the body as an archive within ephemeral art forms and the archive as resource.
Join artist, mother and counsellor-in-training Amelia Hawk for a festive feminist quiz. Don’t worry about wrong answers, this quiz is all about taking part! The quiz will be scattered with a dusting of feminism and a touch of motherhood that will warm you up nicely for the festive period.
Amelia is working with refugees and migrants in Warwickshire alongside multi-disciplinary artist Helen Kilby Nelson to create an activity book for Coventry Biennial. Her practice explores connections between art practice and counselling strategies by making new spaces for conversations that aren't afraid, and are happily political. Amelia runs the podcast Otherwise Silent, making space for people and issues that aren’t often heard. In 2020 she started training to be a Counsellor. But above all that she’s a Mum to a bouncy toddler that doesn’t understand the concept of sleeping through the night!
Phoenix City 2021, Duncan Whitley’s new commission for the Biennial, examines the Coventry’s relationship with the phoenix. Stemming from Donald Gibson and Basil Spence’s use of the mythical bird as a symbol to represent their respective town- planning and cathedral proposals (realised in the 1950s), it also examines the hypothesis that UK City of Culture is conceived as the city’s next ‘phoenix moment’. The film is Whitley’s second collaboration with renowned electronic musician Abul Mogard, and also his second time of working with Coventry’s Jaguar Land Rover Band, who also feature in Things Fall Apart.
Building upon his commissioned sound work for Coventry Cathedral using field recordings of the urban space of Coventry, acclaimed ambient artist KMRU will perform an improvised set in the atmospheric space of Coventry Cathedral’s central nave.
Born in Coventry, Russell Haswell is a restlessly forward-thinking, multi-disciplinary artist, performer and curator. With a background steeped in computer music, black metal, noise, techno and solo improvisation, his practice is renowned for broaching the extremities of visual and sonic arts. For Coventry Biennial he will present a duo of improvised performances that take inspiration from various forms of extreme music, ranging from Detroit techno to black metal.
What began as a modest document of trades, traditions, cultures, home environments and contemporary life in England, evolved and expanded to become an all-consuming project. Mirror With A Memory is a witness to unprecedented events as they unfolded on this singular isle over seven extraordinary years.
The Parallel State is a breakaway state – a space to collectively imagine alternative solutions to life on earth – free from the oppositional constraints of the failed states in which we live. The Parallel State is building new alliances through a series of events, laying the foundations for a Parallel State Summit.
Join book artist Rachel Marsden for a zine-making workshop, giving voice to story-telling and identity. Using the statement ‘TELL ME MORE’ as a starting point, the first session will guide participants in developing an inclusive vocabulary informed by Coventry Biennial’s themes. This will feed into the making of individual and collective zines and pamphlet-style publications in our second session, with paper and print ephemera, photo printing, photocopying, and printmaking techniques.
Learn how trees and other plants talk to each other through their roots and fungal (mycorrhizal) networks. After preparation indoors, we’ll use chalk to draw the root and fungi network of a nearby urban tree onto the surfaces that surround it. Many hands will thus magically reveal a wide (invisible) web of life that lies beneath our feet.
In this workshop we will experiment with singing as a fun way to ‘perform’ a tangled fungi network. We will have samples of living fungi mycelium on hand for inspiration. A gentle voice warm-up will lead into simple singing games that explore the idea of layers, networks, and connections, moving, merging, and separating. Have fun and surprise yourself!
Singers of any (or no) experience welcome. Bring a mat, large towel, or blanket to lie down on!
Coventry Biennial 2021: Part of the BLK Art Group Day
Artists in the BLK Art Group (founded in the 1980s in the Midlands) used collage in many of their famous pieces, which involved using found objects and other materials to create new work with a radical message.
What artwork can you make that speaks to the times we are living in today? Or you can respond to the public art commission by Birmingham 2022 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the BLK Art Group first national gathering. What would your public art look like?
A writing workshop exploring micro and flash fiction. Create new worlds and imagine new futures using an Imagination Accelerator to give mass to our ideas. No previous writing experience is necessary and the workshop assumes no previous knowledge of the subject.
Bring an old book that will be eventually transformed into edible mushrooms. Learn how these beautiful living fungi (something neither plant nor animal) decompose organic material (even books). Lisa will take you through the process of growing grey/blue oyster mushrooms in recycled books and start you on your own mushroom growing journey. The workshop will see each participant inoculate a book with mushroom spawn to take away and nurture, eventually producing beautiful edible mushrooms at home.
Creative session exploring the wild yeasts in the air, on your skin, and more. These lively fungal beings are at the root of many human processes such as making bread, brewing beer or wine, fermenting food or drink (sauerkraut, kimchee, kombucha, etc). How does this work? Can we invite the wild yeasts around us to grow and make even more visible their fizzing vitality? What about sourdough starter as a material for creativity? Come prepared to get a bit messy, to taste, and to explore.
Find out about the microscopic good and bad fungi that naturally live on your skin and inside your body. Play games, peek at some tiny critters through a microscope, grow your own “skin fungi” palm print on a petri dish. A chance to play and learn, with extra time for questions after 3pm.
Workshop run by scientists from University of Exeter’s Centre for Medical Mycology.
Lisa will guide you through the process of turning Shaggy Inkcap mushrooms into ink and then invite you to use this ink for writing, drawing and/or painting inspired by fungi. In the process, find out how inkcap mushrooms emerge as whole fruiting bodies and then gradually ‘deliquesce’ or liquify into a black ink in the process of releasing their spores: a sort of ‘death into new life’ performance. You will take away with you the instructions for creating your own ink from mushrooms and your own writing or drawing/painting.
Mothers Who Make is a fast-growing international initiative aimed at supporting mothers who are artists. Every kind of maker is welcomed and every kind of mother.
When you walk into a room, you get a feeling. Sometimes it’s the décor, sometimes it’s the light or darkness, sometimes it’s the objects within it; the furniture and it’s arrangement, sometimes it’s the sound we make as our footsteps pass through the doorway, sometimes it’s the sound of a ticking clock, the harsh invasiveness of a TV or radio, sometimes it’s sounds coming from outside – gentle birdsong, exhausts ripping up the peace, sometimes it’s the eyes of the people whose gazes you meet.
In this illustrated talk the artist Gil Mualem-Doron (PhD) will present a range of projects that include those led him to escape police arrest, others he received death threats and other works (sometimes even the same ones) for which he gained prime spots in well-respected galleries such as Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary and Southbank Centre. These include the distribution of Molotov cocktails on Tel Aviv’s high street; a project that proposed replacing the Union Jack (before or after the break up of the Union); a series of anti-racist processions orchestrated in the aftermath of Brexit and a beautiful set of jewellery that on closer inspection tells the story of atrocities in the Occupied West Bank in Palestine.
