… like a shortcut through the brambles : Coventry Biennial of Art 2023, The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, 6 October 2023 - 14 January 2024

During Coventry Biennial 2023 artists exhibiting at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum interrogate humankind’s relationship to the world around us. 

Starting with the broad themes of place, the human condition and the intersection of these. Artworks and projects are displayed in galleries as well as in public spaces around the building creating connections with the venue’s collections and other exhibitions and displays.

Focusing on deep time, the mythological and imagined far futures, a number of projects explore what is or might be right under our feet. Water becomes a recurring theme. In a city that is about as far from the sea as you can get in the United Kingdom, artists are asking questions about access to water, local and global water infrastructures and the implications and impacts of living or working on islands. Likewise, what is extracted from the earth is a common thread here, with investigations into petrocultures, guano and geology.

Buried, flowing, growing. Rising, extracted, discarded. Our relationships to the world around us are dense and tangled.

… like a short cut through the brambles at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum is one part of a group exhibition displayed across a pair of sites, please also visit the Old Grammar School.

– –

This exhibition is generously funded by Arts Council England, Coventry City Council, University of Warwick and Coventry University.

Artworks and projects included in this exhibition are presented with the support of British Council, Artangel, University of Warwick, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum and Arts Council Collection.