New Wolverhampton dates for British Art Show 9

Wolverhampton will now host British Art Show 9 (BAS9) in January 2022 after new dates for the touring exhibition were announced by organisers after consultation with the partner cities.

The event – which is the biggest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK – will take place in the city between 22 January and 10 April 2022.

Wolverhampton was due to host the opening of the exhibition in March 2021 however, due to the continuing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions, the dates and order of the tour have been rescheduled. British Art Show 9 will now open in Aberdeen in July 2021.

In Wolverhampton, British Art Show 9 will take place at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the University of Wolverhampton School of Art.  

City of Wolverhampton Council Leader, Councillor Ian Brookfield, said: “It’s unfortunate and unavoidable that British Art Show 9 has been moved back to early next year but the safety of our residents and visitors to our city is paramount.

"We’re looking forward to hosting this prestigious event more than ever. It will bring talented artists to various locations across Wolverhampton including the Art Gallery and the University of Wolverhampton's School of Art.

“The exhibition will be a great way to kick off 2022, a year which will see world class events coming to the city including the Commonwealth Games, Wolverhampton Literature Festival and big-name gigs at our newly refurbished Civic Halls.

“It also gives everyone something exiting to look forward to as better and brighter times are ahead of us following the pandemic.”

The British Art Show is widely recognised as a significant marker of recent developments in contemporary art, unrivalled in its scope and national reach, and has a track record of attracting a high volume of visitors to its touring cities.

British Art Show 8 attracted over 300,000 visitors in its tour to four cities from October 2015 to January 2017.

Maggie Ayliffe, Head of Wolverhampton School of Art, said: “We are thrilled to announce our hosting of the delayed first UK leg of British Art Show 9, when we will safely welcome visitors to our iconic Wolverhampton School of Art.

“The experiences and frustrations of the last year have made it even more important to host an event like the British Art Show that enables conversations with the artists and giving a voice to the most pressing concerns of our times. We can’t wait to begin that here in Wolverhampton.”

British Art Show 9 curators Irene Aristizábal and Hammad Nasar were selected by a panel of curators from Hayward Gallery Touring and the participating cities. They bring international experience to the role and have both worked on major exhibitions in the UK, Europe, America and Asia.

The exhibition introduces visitors to over 40 artists practising in Britain over the past five years, providing an insight into the most exciting contemporary art being produced in this country in this extraordinary moment in our history. The exhibition explores three overarching themes – healing, care and reparative history; tactics for togetherness; and imagining new futures – these conceptual frameworks were devised prior to the pandemic, however, with the recent global recognition of racial injustice sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, all three thematics have become even more relevant to the present moment.

Artists include: Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Simeon Barclay, Oliver Beer, Zach Blas, Kathrin Böhm, Maeve Brennan, James Bridle, Helen Cammock, Than Hussein Clark, Cooking Sections, Jamie Crewe, Oona Doherty, Sean Edwards, Mandy El-Sayegh, Mark Essen, Gaika, Beatrice Gibson, Patrick Goddard, Anne Hardy, Celia Hempton, Andy Holden, Joey Holder, Marguerite Humeau, Lawrence Lek, Ghislaine Leung, Paul Maheke, Elaine Mitchener, Oscar Murillo, Grace Ndiritu, Uriel Orlow, Hardeep Pandhal, Hetain Patel, Florence Peake, Heather Phillipson, Joanna Piotrowska, Abigail Reynolds, Margaret Salmon, Hrair Sarkissian, Katie Schwab, Tai Shani, Marianna Simnett, Victoria Sin, Hanna Tuulikki, Caroline Walker, Alberta Whittle and Rehana Zaman.

IMAGE FOLDER

BAS9 has been conceived as a cumulative experience. The exhibition is designed to change and adapt to each of its four host cities, presenting different combinations of artists and artworks that respond to their distinctive local contexts. The exhibition includes a film programme in each of the four host cities and online, expanding the selection of works on view.

Four of the new works in the British Art Show 9 tour are made possible with the generous support of the Art Fund and these will be acquired by museum partners in each city for their own collections, as a marker of the lasting legacy of this ambitious touring show. BAS9 will also benefit from the support of Arts Council England’s Project Grant for National Activities which is allowing partners to produce ambitious and wide ranging programmes of creative learning, civic engagement and participation that will further extend the reach of BAS9 across the four partner cities.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication published by Hayward Gallery Publishing which includes two wide-ranging curatorial essays, over 200 colour illustrations and original texts on all 47 artists.

For further press information, images and interview requests please contact: Filipa Mendes, Press Manager, Southbank Centre: filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk / 020 7921 0946

Notes to Editors

New Tour details:

10 July – 10 October 2021, Aberdeen: Aberdeen Art Gallery

22 January – 10 April 2022, Wolverhampton: Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Wolverhampton School of Art

13 May – 4 September 2022, Manchester: Castlefield Gallery; HOME; Manchester Art Gallery; and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester 

8 October – 23 December 2022, Plymouth: KARST; The Levinsky Gallery, University of Plymouth; The Box, Plymouth; and The Gallery, Plymouth College of Art

British Art Show 9 Catalogue: RRP £20 Paperback (special exhibition price £16.99) 192 pages 170 x 240 mm ISBN: 9781853323713 Design by Johanne Lian Olsen Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing The publication is available for pre-order from the Southbank Centre shop.

About Hayward Gallery Touring

Hayward Gallery Touring organises contemporary art exhibitions that tour to galleries, museums and other publicly funded venues throughout Britain. In collaboration with artists, independent curators, writers and partner institutions, Hayward Gallery Touring develops imaginative exhibitions that are seen by up to half a million people in over 45 cities and towns each year.

About the Southbank Centre

The Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre and one of the UK's top five visitor attractions, occupying a prominent riverside location that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. We exist to present great cultural experiences that bring people together and we achieve this by providing the space for artists to create and present their best work and by creating a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual and eye-opening work. We want to take people out of the everyday, every day. The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain.

The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. It is also home to four Resident Orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and four Associate Orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain).

About Irene Aristizábal

Irene Aristizábal is the Head of Curatorial and Public Practice at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, where she has curated Judy Chicago’s first major survey in the UK and Abel Rodríguez first solo exhibition. Before BALTIC, Irene worked as Head of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary (2013–9), where she curated exhibitions and commissioned projects by Lis Rhodes, Pia Camil, Steffani Jemison, Otobong Nkanga, Simon Starling, Michael Beutler, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Sun Ra, Rana Hamadeh, Danai Anesiadou, Danh Võ, Carol Rama and Asco.

Recent group exhibitions include Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender Resistance (2018–9) and States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era (2017). She was curator at the FRAC Nord Pas de Calais, Dunkirk in 2010–1, and was the recipient of the H+F Curatorial Grant (2010). Prior to that she co-directed the not-for-profit space Bétonsalon in Paris (2005–6). She has also curated exhibitions at the Fundació Miró, Barcelona; Maison Rouge, Paris; Form Content, London and the Museum of Health Sciences, Bogota. Irene is a member of the Advisory Board of La Galerie, Contemporary Art Centre in Noisy-le-Sec, France.

About Hammad Nasar

Hammad Nasar is Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Principal Research Fellow at the University of the Arts, London. He was the inaugural Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, London (2018-19); Head of Research & Programmes at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2012-16); and, co-founded (with Anita Dawood) the non-profit London art space, Green Cardamom (2004-12). Known for collaborative, research-driven and exhibition-led inquiry, his recent exhibition projects include: Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition (2018-19 – with Kate Jesson); Structures of Meaning | Architectures of Perception (2018-19 – with Sophie Persson); Rock, Paper, Scissors: Positions in Play – the UAE’s national pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archive as Practice (2015 – with Michelle Wong, Ingrid Chu and Vivian Poon); and Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2005-2013 – with Iftikhar Dadi, Ellen Avril, Nada Raza, Sophie Persson and Justine Blau). Nasar is a member of the board of Mophradat (Belgium), of the editorial board of Tate’s magazine, Tate Etc, and serves on the expert panel for Art and Design, History, Practice and Theory as part of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021). He is an advisor to numerous organisations including the Lahore Biennale Foundation (Pakistan); Alserkal Avenue (UAE); and Delfina Foundation, Manchester Art Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery (UK).     

About Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Wolverhampton Art Gallery was purpose built in 1883 to house the city's collections of fine and decorative arts. It has one of the UK's best regional holdings of modern and contemporary art, including the renowned Pop Art collection and art focusing on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Another important area for collecting is that of the British Black Art movement that began in the city in the 1980s. The Art Gallery is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation and attracts around 150,000 visitors annually. For further information please visit http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/

About Wolverhampton School of Art

Wolverhampton School of Art has been at the centre of the City's creative and industrial strategy since the 1850's when our first purpose-built art school was commissioned. Our current home was formally opened to students in October 1970 - 50 years ago. Charles Wheeler's brave and iconic architecture has dominated the Wolverhampton skyline ever since.

Students on our Art, Design and Screen based courses join a creative, practice led community in which they find the time, space and resources to gain high level skills as makers and learn to understand the historical and contemporary scope of their subject.

Socially engaged and community arts practice is core to our history and vision and the Wolverhampton School of Art has a long tradition of working with industry, civic and community partners. We embrace a diverse student body and aim to provide targeted and public access opportunities through an outreach programme that includes school/college experience days, the annual Artsfest and degree shows, exhibitions, conferences and public lectures.

For further press information on Hayward Gallery Touring, images and interview requests please contact: Filipa Mendes, Press Manager, Southbank Centre: filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk / 020 7921 0946

Picture credit: 

Alberta Whittle
Celestial Meditations, 2018

 © the artist. Courtesy of Alberta Whittle and Copperfield, London