A NEW exhibition building on Coventry’s identity as a city of peace and reconciliation will be coming to the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.
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 – along with Rosie Addenbrooke and Alice Swatton.
It explores community, belonging and togetherness and will run across four gallery spaces between February 18 and September 24.
Divided Selves has been developed alongside Coventry Cathedral and will feature the work of 26 different artists, duos and collectives, with many of the works coming from the British Council Collection and the Herbert’s Peace and Reconciliation collections.
The first gallery space will explore the process by which war and geopolitics have divided the earth into nation-states, often through the violent oppression of ethnic minorities.
The works reference 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, with the final two showcasing large-scale immersive works which further discuss these two concepts.
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 and 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.”
