Jack Coventry

I am a visual artist working primarily with video, incorporating performance, composition, editing, writing, and sound design. Automatism and repetition are central to my work, most recently embodied by a taxidermied bison singing songs for flattened flowers. I parade this posthumous material through misapplied generative tools, puppeteered voices, and the stage of the historical avant-garde. Throughout my practice, I’ve maintained an affinity for animals, poetry, and improvisation. I studied painting at the University of Melbourne (VCA) and completed an MFA at UC San Diego. I exhibit internationally and currently live in Venice, Italy.

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
In 2024, I joined a group of young artists and writers to discuss the impending shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This event, likely to occur within the next 30 to 40 years, is expected to trigger an abrupt, cascading climate catastrophe. As the wave of uninhabitability rises, mass migration and social collapse will follow. The voice’s hypnotic instructional tone in Rhyme & Reason echoes the detachment and despair of those conversations. Caught between a flooded future and the present’s winding road, we are directed to forget. In this trance of erasure, language dissolves into landscape, and the cost of discursive retreat becomes clear: “Forget it all. It’s all gone. All gone.”

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
If awarded the CIRCA Prize, I will turn the Piccadilly Circus screen into an illusory facade, extending the Lucent W1 building and reimagining it as a vertical theatre. Through in-studio set construction and digital compositing, I will restage Kathy Acker and Richard Foreman’s opera The Birth of a Poet across five simulated floors, unfolding simultaneous scenes of a meltdown in future New York, an affair in modern-day Iran, and the fall of the Roman Empire. The work draws on theatricality, ruin, and survival amid the refuse of accelerated “progress.” Within this illusion of architecture, performance becomes debris, and the facade doubles as both container and stage for the remnants of cultural time.

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Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!