Hayward Gallery Touring Presents British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers

In 2026, Hayward Gallery Touring presents British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers, shaped by the curatorial vision of Ekow Eshun. Launching in Coventry in October 2026, the exhibition will tour to Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield, and Newcastle Gateshead, bringing together over 30 artists for a vital overview of some of the most exciting work produced in the UK over the past five years. The timing feels pointed. British Art Show 10 arrives amid heightened anxiety: a divisive political culture, an accelerating climate crisis, and a growing public distrust in institutions. In polarising times, the exhibition asks a deceptively simple question: what forms might empathy or shared imagination take?

At its core, A Chorus of Strangers considers how art can challenge fears of otherness and difference, especially those sparked in periods of uncertainty or change. Rather than framing the outsider — the “stranger” — as a threat, British Art Show 10 invites a shift toward empathy. It moves away from rigid distinctions of “us” and “them,” and instead explores the variety of perspectives that come from looking through the eyes of others.

Eshun elaborates, “Across centuries, artists have used their ability to work with uncertainty, contradiction, and possibility to create works that privilege affinity over isolation. British Art Show 10 celebrates their unique position while looking ahead to the future. Some works address the social fractures and the environmental fragility of the present, while others offer more intimate gestures of kinship. Together, they illuminate art’s ability to cross boundaries: between ourselves and others, the human and the natural world, the past and the futures yet to unfold.”

The exhibition is organised around three overlapping curatorial themes spanning the psychological, sociological, and ecological. Each theme is inspired by the work of an influential British writer or theorist who has grappled with the tensions between the individual and the other.

Moments of Being takes its title from Virginia Woolf’s description of those fleeting instances when the surface of ordinary life seems to lift, offering a brief glimpse into the interconnectedness of existence. The artists gathered here similarly turn inward as they observe the world around them. Drawing on dreams, memory, and the subconscious, their works explore blurred boundaries: between mind and body, reality and imagination. What emerges is not escapism, but a deeper way of understanding ourselves — and the conditions that shape shared experience.

Inspired by cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Ways of Living begins from the idea that culture and identity are always in motion, continually reshaped by the shifting interplay of politics, power, and history. Working with personal and collective memory, the artists in this section illuminate how fragments of the past persist in the present — and how individual stories intersect with larger historical currents. Collectively, these works ask what it might mean to build common ground, not by smoothing over difference, but by actively reimagining life with one another.

States of Nature draws on ecological philosopher Timothy Morton’s call for a greater awareness of our relationship with the environment — an understanding that all life forms are fundamentally interconnected within a vast, complex network of being. This theme brings together artists whose work embraces the natural world in its abundance, beauty, and complexity. Animals, plants, air, and water are foregrounded as part of our shared living history, offering ways of coexisting that challenge the human-centric and invite us to imagine a new relationship with the planet.