The The Shelter of Stories: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling

Location: Compton Verney, Warwic, UK

Dates: 23 October 2025 – 22 February 2026

The Shelter of Stories: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling explores how storytelling interacts with belonging: passing on stories, making them up, and sharing them can foster feelings of safety and home. At a time when wars, climate change, and various forms of intolerance and exclusion are causing mass displacements, we ask,

'Can stories offer refuge? Can they help heal the fractures and lessen the experience of dislocation? Can a common store of the imagination offer a form of sanctuary?' Through a wide variety of artists' works from different periods and cultures the exhibition unfolds a story about this central defining activity of human society.

There is no culture in the world without stories, and they have travelled - and still travel - across barriers of faith, ethnicity, and language. Stories are mobile, and we carry them with us as we move. In the long period before mass literacy, visual artists the world over have been leading tellers of stories, sacred and other. Ancient story cycles, from Gilgamesh to the Ramayana, the Trojan epics to One Thousand and One Nights, are still living and breathing, still inspiring sympathy, wonder, pleasure - and illumination.

Through bringing together an array of objects and works of art both ancient and modern The Shelter of Stories asks, 'Why tell stories?, 'What are stories for?' and explores three interwoven purposes: to know the worst and placate the powers that govern fate; to live with nature and secure the survival of the earth and humanity's existence on it; and to pass on knowledge and wisdom. In the contemporary global turmoil, artists are offering ways of being at home in the world. Part of the flourishing renaissance of narrative art, they bear witness to their own history, reflect on the experience of estrangement and seek to form a new sense of arrival, of sanctuary. Even as stories tell of grief and suffering, they strengthen and console, however unlikely a happy ending may be.