Inside the Barbican's 'Game of Thrones' power struggle

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Only 10 minutes into the Barbican Centre’s board meeting, the gathered officials kicked me out. The sole public attendee at the supposedly open meeting, I had navigated the maze of corridors in the City of London’s Guildhall meeting and parked myself on a chair in the corner of a wood-panelled conference room in an attempt to better understand a crisis that has been hanging over one of the capital’s most important arts institutions for months.

At the end of last year, 250 of the country’s leading arts professionals had massed on the iconic lakeside terrace of the Barbican. They were there to celebrate the launch of the Barbican Centre’s new artistic programme and, by extension, the woman who had designed it: Devyani Saltzman. An esteemed author and artistic director who’d worked at and led a string of the US and Canada’s major art festivals and institutions, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the fourth largest museum in North America.

Saltzman had joined the Barbican as artistic director just over a year before, and within that time had revolutionised their programming of plays, films, performances and exhibitions. In doing so, she had become the public face of the organisation. One magazine even labelled her the “driving force” behind the Barbican.

Hi, I'm Andrew, the author of this story. For this piece, I spent months tracking down former and current employees, speaking to sources and getting the inside scope from arts professionals.

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The launch was a big moment symbolically for the Barbican, a chance to move on after multiple institutional racism scandals and carve a bright new future at the forefront of British arts with its first woman of colour at the helm of its artistic programming. Introducing Saltzman to the crowd that night, and among the many people showering her in praise, was William Russell: a City of London politician and the chair of the board that runs the centre for the City.

But just a few weeks later, news broke that Saltzman was leaving the Barbican, with the organisation putting out a statement celebrating her “highly successful tenure”. An outraged open letter was sent to the Barbican signed by more than 170 writers and creatives, including Salman Rushdie and Pankaj Mishra. It claimed the move raised “serious questions about the institution’s commitment to sustaining global majority leadership at the highest levels”. The Barbican and the City of London, the archaic, thousand-year old local authority that runs the centre, has consistently refused to comment publicly about the upheaval. Yet despite extensive coverage in the national and artistic press, no-one has been able to work out what happened. 

Until now. Over the past few weeks, we’ve exclusively spoken to former Barbican leaders and staffers and leading figures in the art world to understand what’s really been going on at one of the country’s leading art centres. In doing so, we found out that the senior restructure has left the organisation without an artistic director, and heard from ex-staff who painted a picture of a workplace akin to “Game of Thrones”, where the City of London, the centre’s owner and patron, had increasingly curtailed its independence. And at the end of this tale of spiralling deficits and accusations of conflicts of interest, serious questions about the Barbican’s future ahead of a planned closure for a £191m refurbishment begin to emerge.