Herbert Art Gallery & Museum – Divided Selves

The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum showcases art, history and archaeology. This includes fascinating paintings and visual art, as well as historical artefacts. This year, the gallery is proud to bring the Divided Selves exhibitions to their programme. Here we look at what you can expect.

Divided Selves: Legacies, Memories, Belonging – 18th February – 24th September

This exhibition at Herbert art gallery covers the concept of community and collective identity in a time when the concept of nation is endangered by issues like populism and armed conflict. Divided Selves examines ideas of belonging and coexistence and exhibits artwork by artists examining how we:

• Recognise and accept your challenging and traumatic pasts without letting them paralyse you.
• Pay attention to and elevate viewpoints that are typically disregarded or silenced.
• Work together to create a shared future as state citizens and community members.

Four galleries make up the presentation of Divided Selves. First, the works examine how conflict and geopolitics have divided the world into nation states whose stability is put at peril by ethnic minority oppression and war. We are reminded of their fragility by historical anniversaries of splits and the frequently violent formation of states.
In the second gallery, artists explore concepts of nationalism using common histories, myths, and cultural narratives rather than geographic boundaries and lines. This is in keeping with political scientist Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities.”

The two remaining galleries create expansive, immersive pieces that combine these various but related notions of group identity. These two galleries will switch during the exhibition to display pieces presented in Coventry — and some in the UK — for the first time.

Divided Selves: Community Flags Project – 2nd June – 24th September

The exhibition at Herbert art gallery showcases a bunch of flags made by neighbourhood organisations with the help of Larry Achiampong’s artwork as inspiration. Larry is a British-Ghanaian artist and one of the exhibitors. He employs a variety of artistic techniques to look into issues of class, gender, culture, and our use of technology.

Community organisations used four colours and Larry’s symbols as inspiration to design the flags you see here. To reflect themselves, their identity, their beliefs, and their aspirations for the future, the groups created a hand-stitched flag. One of four imagined flags Larry created to represent the 54 nations of Africa, should they unite to form a big united system, is featured in Divided Selves. The flag’s components were all carefully selected.

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