Coventry Biennial celebrates and promotes contemporary art, producing high quality exhibitions, activities and events in one of the UK’s most creative and industrious cities. This biennial festival is deeply connected to Coventry, its histories and wider context, but also retains an outward looking perspective, ensuring that the programme has wider appeal, significance and impact.
Now working towards our second festival in 2019, we are also looking forward to contributing to Coventry taking the title of UK City of Culture in 2021 and we intend to play a significant part in attracting local, national and international audiences to experience the distinctive voices, rich culture and diversity inherent to Coventry.
Our programme occupies unexpected sites in the city such as historic buildings, community centres, empty retail units, theatres and public spaces as well as more traditional gallery and museum spaces. This invites new audiences leading to distinctive interactions with both the works on display and the city.
The biennial is artist-led, meaning that it was founded by, is owned by and is run by artists and aims to provide meaningful opportunities for practitioners at all stages of their careers, from recent graduates to established artists, with peer-to-peer development opportunities embedded into the programme via artist residencies, internships, workshops and commissions. We seek to attract artists and creatives to the city, to retain recent graduates and to ensure visiting artists are supported in fully engaging with the city and its residents.
Coventry Biennial seeks to secure its position as a key date on the national and international contemporary art circuit and to build on the West Midlands’ strong festival offer.
