SAVE THE DATE: HYPER-POSSIBLE: COVENTRY BIENNIAL 2021

The third Coventry Biennial will take place from Friday 8 October 2021 until January 2022 across Coventry and Warwickshire. Titled ‘HYPER-POSSIBLE’, in a reference to the radical nature of Coventry’s history, it also signifies a positive way forward following a deeply difficult 2020. The Biennial will be a key visual arts element of the Coventry UK City of Culture 2021.

The exhibitions, events and activities which make up the third Biennial will focus on three important movements in art history which have centered in Coventry and Warwickshire:

• Art & Language – A group of artists, students and lecturers who met at Coventry Polytechnic in the late 1960s. The group were internationally successful and had a huge impact on what was becoming known at the time as Conceptual Art.
• The BLK Art Group – Black art students who were based across the Midlands in the 1980s and had a significant group exhibition at The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in 1983.
• Cybernetic Culture Research Unit – Researchers associated with the Philosophy Department of the University of Warwick in the 1990s and early 2000s who have had a significant impact on contemporary thinking and international artistic practice.

Artists will use these three moments as starting points for new commissions, developing artworks that respond to current global concerns and trends within contemporary artistic practice, including the impact of technology on society, belief, participatory approaches to sharing knowledge, protest, activism and dissent, our relationships to the places that we live in and the impacts of climate change.

To date, we have commissioned and been working with the following artists:

• Ayo Akingbade
• Ryan Christopher
• Faye Claridge
• Laura Dicken
• Georgiou & Tolley
• Grace Ndiritu
• Alan Van Wijgerden
• melissandre varin
• Duncan Whitley

Over the coming months each artist, along with local galleries, museums, curators and communities, will contribute to creating the HYPER-POSSIBLE. Details of the commissions, additional artists and the full programme will be announced in the lead-up to the start of the Coventry UK City of Culture in May 2021.

We look forward to sharing it with you. Stay safe x

 

(Image: Amen, Ryan Christopher.)

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