Former IKEA building hosts new exhibition ‘House is a Feeling’

Is Coventry synonymous with House music? Surprisingly – yes. The city had a bustling rave music scene in the late 80s and early 90s, fore fronted by the popular club The Eclipse, later known as The Edge.

To celebrate this vibrant aspect of the city’s culture, Coventry City of Culture Trust teamed up with artist Adi Dowling to create the ‘House is a Feeling’ exhibition.

The exhibition is taking place in the old IKEA building on Croft Road in the city centre, which is the perfect “mysterious” location for such a display.  

“It was clear to us from the outset that this is going to be huge, I mean it’s sixteen rooms of content… it’s a journey and it was important for Adi the artist to be able to show each section of that journey within the exhibition,” said Shine Duggal, exhibition producer.

“So that kind of delegated the size of it because there is a lot of content. There are seven pieces of moving Image and a series of radio documentaries together with the artwork, the sensory elements, the lasers, the strobes, the lighting etc. So, the idea for IKEA came about partly because of the size of the exhibition and we needed a space that would accommodate that.”

Similar to Two Tone a decade before, House music came at a time when social and racial issues were causing tension between different kinds of people. The scene became an escape for Coventry’s youth.

 “It (House music) made a massive difference to the way people were, to their attitudes, to how they behaved, how they thought”, said Roger Germaine, exhibition assistant.

 “Before that, there was a lot of rivalries going on in all fractions of life. People put down all the bad feelings towards each other and were much more welcoming toward each other. It was a much happier time”.

Shine described some of the motivation behind Adi’s work; “As a young person, so older teenager, he started to collect newspaper cuttings, music, and footage. And he's been doing that for about 30 or 40 years.

 “So that's where the, the kind of the seedling of the idea for the exhibition came about. From his experience as a young person, but also, he’s quite open about describing himself as a working class white Irish also felt that he belonged to one of these disaffected communities, and some of the social issues and ramifications of that affected him as a human being.

 “And he saw this scene as a real sort of a kind of a movement, which provided access for so many different people on lots of different levels. And he's particularly interested in young people from disaffected backgrounds, who perhaps have had limited access to education. And therefore, this opportunity also opened the door for them to become kind of entrepreneurs, so to DJ to start bootlegging music, which obviously isn't legal, but that did create, the start of a multi- million-pound, music industry, you know, where events were recorded, and then tapes were sold of those events.

 “And then this became a huge part of youth culture during the sort of mid to late 80s and 90s, where we didn't have social media and technology, and we couldn't just get anything we wanted at the snap of a finger on YouTube or through the web”.