A major new exhibition that builds on Coventry’s identity as a city of peace and reconciliation and on the legacy of UK City of Culture is coming to the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum next month.
Divided Selves: Legacies, Memories, Belonging has been curated by Hammad Nasar MBE – the curator behind the Turner Prize exhibition at the Herbert during Coventry 2021 – with Rosie Addenbrooke and Alice Swatton.
The new exhibition, which explores community, belonging and togetherness will run across four gallery spaces from February 18 through to September 24. It means there are just a few weeks left of the hugely popular Grown Up in Britain exhibition, which will close on February 12.
Divided Selves will feature the work of 26 different artists, duos and collectives and many of the works are drawn from the British Council Collection and the Herbert’s own Peace & Reconciliation collections.
The exhibition is also being developed in collaboration with Coventry Cathedral, which is internationally known for its peace and reconciliation mission, which started following its destruction in the November 1940 Blitz
Divided Selves also points to the development of the new National Collections Centre in Coventry, where the old Ikea building will be transformed to become the new home for the Arts Council Collection, the British Council Collection and the collections of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.
Divided Selves curator Hammad Nasar MBE, said: “Through the remarkable work of 26 artists and artist groups, Divided Selves explores the timely question of how we belong to a place.
“It reveals some of the forces, processes and infrastructures that shape how we share geography and history; and it does so with a sense of agency and resilience that can often desert us in our testing times.
“In making Divided Selves at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum we are experimenting with how we work with multiple collections, collaborate with civic institutions, and inject dynamism into the format of the exhibition itself.
“By showcasing works in the Herbert’s and British Council collections alongside new works, presentations and interventions by some of the most thoughtful artists working today, we see Divided Selves as an invitation to audiences in Coventry and beyond to join us in shaping new, more hopeful stories that underpin our sense of community.”
Director of Culture at CV Life, Marguerite Nugent, said: “The themes explored within Divided Selves build on Coventry’s identity as a city of ‘Peace and Reconciliation’, resonating with local people as well as tackling issues that are being debated nationally. Coventry’s history as a diverse city, home to many different communities makes it an appropriate place for these types of discussions to take place.
“The exhibition also provides an opportunity for the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum to present our contemporary art collections alongside national collections, ahead of a shared collection facility in the city. It will enable us to pilot new ways of presenting our collections following the ambitious UK City of Culture 2021 programme.”
In the first gallery space, the works explore the process by which war and geo-politics have divided the earth into nation states – often through the violent oppression of ethnic minorities.
The works presented here point to a variety of historic contexts, including the First World War, the Partition of India, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Cold War, the Pan-African movement and protests against the Vietnam War.
In the second gallery, visitors engage with ideas of nation and nationality through works that wrestle with political scientist Benedict Anderson’s powerful conceptualisation of nations as ‘imagined communities’ – imaginative constructs built from shared histories, stories and cultural narratives.
The remaining two galleries will present large-scale immersive works that place the two separate but overlapping conceptions of national identity articulated above in conversation.
The exhibition opens with film installations of Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press and Jane & Louise Wilson and, in June, half way through the course of the exhibition, these two galleries will change to present works by Hetain Patel and Aziz Hazara exploring the human capacity for resilience through ritual and play.
This will be the Berlin-based Aziz Hazara’s first presentation of work in the UK. Bani Abidi’s presentation at Coventry Cathedral will be timed to coincide with this change in presentation.