A STATEMENT FROM OUR CEO AND CO-CHAIR
Coventry Biennial
We were recently notified that our application to join Arts Council’s England’s National Portfolio of Organisations was unsuccessful. While we hoped to achieve NPO status for 2023-26, the team and our Board are now planning the next steps for Coventry Biennial.
Paula Orrell, one of the co-chairs of Coventry Biennial’s board comments:
“The Board is committed to supporting our brilliant team in the organisation’s next phase. Our work impacts the lives of artists and the community we support throughout the wider region of Coventry and beyond. Although becoming an NPO would have secured our future, we now must innovate and examine our role to continue providing a different experience of contemporary art for our engaged and new audiences. This will take time, but we will certainly get there, steered by Ryan Hughes and Sevven Kucuk, and supported by the entire board.”
Ryan Hughes, Coventry Biennial Artistic Director and CEO says:
“Coventry Biennial started in 2017 as an artist-led, strategically aligned project. With the timelines for the city’s bid to become UK City of Culture aligning with the city’s 10 year cultural strategy, we saw the opportunity for the unique structure of a Contemporary Art Biennial. We turned this observation into a plan with artists, communities, friends and colleagues across the city and region.
And so, since 2017, we worked towards 2021/22, and delivered an exceptional programme of social, political and critical art that we hoped would carry us into the next round of NPO, creating some stability and enabling us to support and develop artistic practice, our team and the city and the region that we call home.
We achieved much of this. We have delivered 3 biennials since 2017, attracting more than 1,000,000 visitors to artworks, exhibitions and events in Coventry and Warwickshire. We made a significant contribution to the UK City of Culture year, presenting work alongside the Turner Prize and other internationally significant moments.
Our work locally has ensured that we’ve contributed to all 5 goals in the city’s Cultural Strategy – Partnership, Lifelong Learning, Diversity, Health and Wellbeing and Economic Growth, while our collaborative approach has enabled us to make significant international projects in the Netherlands, the USA and in Italy while supporting artists in Asia, South America and in Australia as well as across Europe.
While we hoped to achieve NPO status for 2023-26, we are delighted to see that Coventry does now have more NPOs and we were really pleased to see that many of our closest partners in Coventry and Warwickshire maintained their investment. We would like to take this moment to congratulate our friends and partners in the sector.
This decision, of course, has huge ramifications for us, and we now have a very large and difficult job ahead of us, but we will return in October 2023. The programme may look and feel different to previous years, but that’s OK.
Our organisational aims are to CONNECT, MAKE and DEVELOP and that is what we will continue to do. In the current climate, these things are too important not to. We will connect with artists, audiences, communities, institutions, groups and individuals. We will make art. We will develop opportunity.
We will be artists. We will continue to contribute to Coventry’s cultural landscape and work with our local communities.
We will remember that only 6 years ago the possibility of a ‘Coventry Biennial’ seemed improbable and we will take solace in the idea that some may still think it is. We know it is not, and maybe this is where our real value lies.”
by Ryan Hughes