Feelings in Common - British Council Collection Exhibition

Enabling and strengthening creative connections between the United Kingdom and Türkiye has always been at the heart of our arts programming in Türkiye. This mission is not unique to Türkiye, of course; it sits at the core of the British Council’s work in more than one hundred countries worldwide. 

In the exhibition catalogue, Elliott Burns describes the collection as a ‘liquid collection’. Emma Dexter, Director of Visual Arts and the British Council Collection, refers to it as ‘a lending library of works, ready to be borrowed by the world.’ Both metaphors feel strikingly accurate. Feelings in Common is not a touring exhibition imposed by the institution; rather, it is a carefully curated selection shaped through a deeply subjective lens. Drawing from close to 9,000 works in the collection, Ulya Soley, the curator of the exhibition, has developed a narrative structured around three distinct yet interconnected chapters: Preserving Care, Familiar Faces and Future Perfect. Across these sections, works by 29 artists come together to trace what feels like a hidden route — one that invites the viewer into a shared emotional landscape. Through this framework, the works enter into dialogue with one another, generating layers of meaning that unfold collectively as the audience moves through the exhibition. 

At a time when international relations are marked by heightened tension, and public funding for cross-border collaboration is increasingly constrained by economic pressures, this gathering of voices feels particularly resonant. In the midst of what we might call a post-truth moment, 29 artists — differing in age, race, sexual orientation and artistic practice — all of whom have lived and worked within the geography of the United Kingdom, come together here. They represent the richness and complexity of British cultural life. Alongside canonical figures such as Lucian Freud and Tracey Emin, whose positions in art history are well established, the exhibition also introduces us to artists like Madame Yevonde, whose work many of us encounter for the first time through the collection. 

What makes this selection especially compelling, in my view, is that all the works presented are early pieces from the artists’ careers. These are not works one might easily encounter elsewhere or along other global exhibition routes. How fortunate we are, then, to engage with a collection shaped by generations of committed arts professionals within the British Council, working in close collaboration with independent experts beyond the institution. Together, they have created a shared cultural value that reaches back across decades and today, through Ulya Soley’s curatorial vision, brings us together around the emotional lives of these works. 

This encounter, for me, is the clearest expression of how the collection moves beyond storage and stasis to find new life across borders. The works do not gain meaning solely by being shown in a different country; they are continually reactivated through the new constellations in which they appear, through the dialogues formed by their proximity to one another in each exhibition context. ‘A Museum without Walls’ is, at its core, a collection that refuses to recognise borders.