The tenth British Art Show, titled A Chorus of Strangers and curated by Ekow Eshun, is spread across venues in Coventry until 10 January, with 37 artists whose works were made over the past five years. Writing in ArtReview, critic Mark Rappolt reads the edition as a mirror of contemporary Britain: confused, angry, threatening and full of mixed messages about what Britishness means.

At the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, the contemporary display sits beside the venue's own historical exhibits, including the touring skeleton of Dippy the Diplodocus and a display on Jurassic marine life in Warwickshire. The opening work, Lindsey Mendick's Wicked Game from 2025, arranges clay animal figures like a broken, life-size chess set, blending a lion Queen Elizabeth I with figures drawn from Greek myth.

Upstairs, the tone sharpens. Alex Margo Arden's Accounts, also from 2025, groups eleven life-size white male mannequins, salvaged from scrapped dioramas at the National Motor Museum, into a roped-together crowd of tradesmen from mid-twentieth-century Britain. Nearby, Mahtab Hussain and Guy Gunaratne's video Here Is The Brick cuts between news footage of a racist attack on an Asian shopkeeper and images of British South Asian and Muslim achievement in sport, while Hussain's photographs document 160 mosques across Birmingham.

At the Mead Gallery, Matthew Krishanu's paintings recall a mixed-race childhood in Bangladesh, Dala Nasser reimagines a ruined sixth-century Lebanese basilica in wood and cyanotype fabric, and Nnena Kalu fills walls with obsessive spiral drawings. At Coventry University's Delia Derbyshire Building, video and dance take over, including Melanie Manchot's nocturnal Bristol performers and Liz Johnson Artur's archive of Black dancing bodies. Rappolt's verdict is that the show's anger stays polite: its fury never quite breaks out of the white cube.