Running the Barbican arts centre could never be mistaken for a stroll in a rose garden. “I’ve come close to suicide once or twice,” declared its first director, Henry Wrong, after the centre ran up millions of pounds of debt after its first couple of seasons. Then his successor, Detta O’Cathain, was forced out in a backstage putsch instigated by the London Symphony Orchestra, a resident company at the centre.
More recently another Barbican chief executive, Nicholas Kenyon, departed shortly after disgruntled staff published a grudge document accusing the organisation of being “toxic”, “inherently racist” and “in free fall”. That was in 2021. His replacement, the urbane former BBC arts editor Will Gompertz, breezed in promising all sorts of entrepreneurial and educational innovations — and breezed out just two years later with none achieved.
And now? The Barbican’s present chief executive, the Australian Claire Spencer, has to manage a 40-year-old brutalist building that is showing its age. For a start it must boast the most unreliable lavatories of any venue in London, which is saying something. The latest estimate from the City of London Corporation, the Barbican’s owner, is that £450 million is needed to renovate the place in a project called Barbican Renewal, but so far the local authority has pledged only a few million for urgent “health and safety” repairs (to include the loos, one hopes).
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So a hearty welcome into this joyous establishment for Devyani Saltzman, a Canadian author and curator, announced today as the Barbican’s director of arts and participation. “I know brutalist buildings and I kind of love them, and I love the history of the Barbican,” she says. “The challenge is how these spaces can be used in new ways.”
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Those are brave words, given the Barbican’s history. But then Saltzman, 44 — whose previous jobs were director of public programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario and, before that, director of literary arts at the Banff Centre in Alberta — comes from brave stock. Though Canadian by nationality, her father, Paul Saltzman, comes from a Ukrainian-Jewish background, while her mother, Deepa Mehta, is Punjabi born. Both are distinguished film-makers who specialise in tackling social issues. In her mother’s case that has included an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and a feminist trilogy, Elements, that was hugely controversial in her native India. Does Saltzman think this determination to tackle difficult subjects has rubbed off on her?
“One hundred per cent,” she says on a Zoom call from Mexico, where she is finishing writing a book before her Barbican job begins in July. “I consider myself Canadian but I also consider myself between multiple worlds. And I grew up in a family of artists who were very political in their film-making. That’s definitely something I feel I bring to creative programming. What excites me about the Barbican is how we can continue to present the most innovative work out there, locally and internationally, but also be really brave in our decisions. Cultural organisations need to be bold.”
Coming from “multiple worlds”, does she feel her new job will be to make the shows in the Barbican’s two theatres, two art galleries, three cinemas and concert hall more international? “I am equally excited about building relationships with east London communities and with those areas of the world that haven’t been presented enough at the Barbican,” she says. “Working with Mexican, Indian, Chinese and Palestinian artists is as much a part of our brief as being deeply local.”
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I understand the “arts” part of her title, but what does the “participation” bit mean? “Engaging the communities that we are existing in and working for,” she says. But in the case of the Barbican, that surely means engaging with some of the wealthiest people in Britain — those working in the Square Mile’s financial institutions — and some of the poorest — the largely non-white communities of Tower Hamlets and the other east London boroughs. Can the Barbican do both? And as the centre’s first arts director to be a woman of colour, does she feel big arts organisations are still too white and middle class in their leadership and appeal?
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“I think it’s changing, but across most cultural institutions, absolutely yes,” Saltzman says. “That’s why appointments such as that of Indhu [Rubasingham] to be artistic director at the National Theatre are exciting. We are actually in a new wave of next-generation leadership that hopefully is going to shift the model.”
She is joining an organisation described by its own staff as inherently racist only three years ago. Is she certain it is changed enough? “I haven’t been on the inside yet,” she says. “But I am joining because there is this change in terms of its leadership. We have to create a space that is authentically welcoming to all. That has to do with what we put on our stages and screens, and how people and staff are treated on the inside.”
There are certainly plenty of newish faces in the Barbican’s management now. Saltzman’s role must not, for example, be confused with Ali Mirza’s (“director of people, culture and inclusion”). But the publisher’s blurb about the book she is writing (Exiting: Towards a Future of Work that Serves Us All) seems to suggest that people of colour invited to take on senior roles in arts institutions are quickly leaving them again, perhaps demoralised by what they face.
“There has been a recent trend of appointments putting pressure on a few people of colour to carry forward the change mandate,” Saltzman says, “and that’s not necessarily sustainable. We have seen a lot of those people, across North America at least, exit those positions. But the second half of my book is about how organisations are starting to function in different ways to be more authentically equitable — the Barbican included, or else I wouldn’t be joining.”
Fair enough, but isn’t there another problem with places such as the Barbican and indeed with London’s Southbank Centre over the river? Invented as giant culture palaces in the postwar era, they now seem shabby, inflexible and infused more with bureaucracy than creativity. Are they still fit for purpose?
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“I agree with you — they have to change from that postwar model,” Saltzman says. “Why I joined the Barbican is Claire’s leadership and the potential for institutions to move away from bureaucracy. They need to become more nimble. They need to use their public funding to address the needs of their communities.”
Saltzman has a fascinating backstory, as they say in the movies — part of which she told in her first book, Shooting Water: A Memoir of Second Chances, Family, and Filmmaking. When she was 11 her parents had a flaming row at the Cannes Film Festival, decided to divorce and asked their daughter to choose, there and then, whom she wanted to live with. She chose Dad. Reconciliation with her mother came only years later. “Our time together was painful and always haunted by my choice,” she writes.
That, she says, partly explains why she did not do the obvious thing and go into films like her parents. “I went in the other direction,” she says. “I deliberately studied sciences [she did sociology and anthropology at Oxford]. I didn’t think I would enter the arts. My plan after Oxford was to go to London and be a journalist. But someone told me there was an arts festival starting up in Toronto and suggested I talk to the people running it. It was called Luminato and I became one of its founding team members.”
Today all bridges seem to have been mended with her parents. “They are now in their seventies and eighties, so they are coming to live with me part-time in London,” she says. “I grew up in a multigenerational home in New Delhi and family is incredibly important. But it’s also a question of not wanting to live in isolation, as a single person who is starting a new role with a lot of responsibility.”
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