LONDON.- Hayward Touring announced the appointment of Anna Colin and Lydia Yee as the curators for British Art Show 8, opening in October 2015 in Leeds, and touring to Edinburgh, Norwich and Southampton. The exhibition is the biggest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK art calendar. British Art Show 7 attracted over 420,000 visitors in its tour to four cities in 2010 and 2011. Lydia Yee and Anna Colin were selected by a panel of senior curators from Hayward Touring and representatives of the participating galleries. They bring international experience to the role and have each worked on major exhibitions in the UK, Europe and USA.

The British Art Show is widely recognised as a significant marker of recent developments in contemporary art, unrivalled in its scope and national reach. The exhibition introduces a wide public to a new generation of British artists, providing a vital overview of the most exciting art produced in this country during the previous five years. This time it will tour to venues including Leeds Art Gallery; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Inverleith House Gallery and Talbot Rice Gallery; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich University of the Arts, and Sainsbury’s Centre for the Visual Arts; Southampton Art Gallery and John Hansard Gallery (in a major new building in the city centre). This will be the first time the British Art Show has toured to East Anglia.

Anna Colin and Lydia Yee, said, "We are delighted to have been selected to curate The British Art Show 8 and look forward to building upon the show's vital forty year history and expanding its possibilities. We plan to develop the exhibition in close dialogue with emerging and established artists who reflect the complexity of artistic practice today and to foster a lively exchange between the artists, venues and audiences.”

Roger Malbert, Senior Curator, Hayward Touring, said: “For almost four decades the British Art Show has been acknowledged as one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art in this country. Each edition has captured a unique moment in British art, and this one will be no different. We are delighted that Lydia Yee and Anna Colin have accepted our invitation to curate British Art Show 8. They bring to the role a wealth of experience and understanding of British and international contemporary art. Both have solid reputations as curators and thinkers and we are privileged to be able to share their breadth of knowledge and creative vision with our partner galleries across the UK.”

Lydia Yee is Curator at Barbican Art Gallery. Her recent exhibitions include Bauhaus: Art as Life (2013, co-curated with Catherine Ince), Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene (2011) and Ron Arad: Restless (2010). She has overseen commissions by Cory Arcangel, John Bock, Ayse Erkmen, Geoffrey Farmer, and Robert Kusmirowski, among many others for the Barbican’s Curve gallery. Prior to joining Barbican Art Gallery, Yee was Senior Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, where she was responsible for the exhibition programme and collection. She was the recipient of the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award in 2006 for Street Art, Street Life. In 2003, she was the Cassullo Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. She has also contributed essays to exhibition catalogues and publications on artists including Susan Hiller, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Martin Wong.

Anna Colin is a curator and writer based in London. She is a co-founder and co-director of Open School East, a non-fee paying study programme and communal space which launched in 2013 in East London. She is also associate curator at Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris. Colin has curated exhibitions and projects in spaces including the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool; Le Quartier, contemporary art centre of Quimper; La Synagogue de Delme, Delme; la Maison populaire, Montreuil; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Turin; CIC Cairo; and The Women’s Library, London. She was co-director of Bétonsalon, Paris in 2011-12, and curator at Gasworks, London, in 2007-10, where she curated group and solo exhibitions with artists including Matthew Darbyshire, Olivia Plender, The Otolith Group, Gail Pickering and Martin Beck.