This text was originally published in The Critic.
This year’s edition of Liverpool Biennial marks the end of contemporary art’s authority over contemporary life.
When Liverpool Biennial launched in 1998, this largest contemporary art festival in Britain brimmed with optimism that today seems fanciful. That art designed elsewhere and imported into the city could capture local hearts, minds, and wallets was a heady but then graspable aim. Alas, the event’s most recent edition which opened in early June, however, reaches no such feats. It marks the demise of a global art aesthetics in a sorry non-spectacle that barely conceals its financial and ideological ruin.
BEDROCK, curator Marie-Anne McQuay’s proposal for Liverpool purports to reflect the distinctive beliefs and geography that “underpin the city”. Such an inquiry might have been fruitful, given that Scouse Town’s cultural constitution has been put to the test many times. For thirty “international” artists to ask what lies at the foundations of a major British urban centre—other than Beatles nostalgia on the one hand and the “loss” and “legacies of colonialism” as McQuay has it on the other—might uncover that those foundations are showing signs of erosion. Such an inquiry would force art to admit that it can offer little in its present form to arrest this cultural subsidence.
Beyond this statement of intent, it’s hard to find a logic that binds BEDROCK. It may well have been “recycling”. Many works, such as those by Cevdet Erek or Mounira Al Solh on show at Tate Liverpool’s borrowed RIBA North space, circulated widely in other biennials many years ago. The display at Walker Art Gallery also trades in repurposed ideas. The Panamanian and Serbian duo Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic set up a mobile disco display Concrete Roots/Griots Epic Stories from the Black Atlantic. Their wood and dyed fabric contraptions are neither thrones nor DJ booths. There’s no space for the dancers, either, and the installation looks as though it was thought up for a different context. Behind the sculptures, Guzman and Jankovic hung a series of emotive written claims on Liverpool’s pancultural solidarities. Their meanings are shamelessly distorted from stories taken from the local press.
Next door, Katarzyna Perlak’s brand-new embroidered text hanging Mother Tongue made out of woven polypropene bags is imposing. Its contents, however, are inconsequential wisdoms like “hope dies last”, not meaningfully placeable—not least owing to the work’s use of Polish-language headlines—in the tradition of political quilts in which it roots itself. That tradition is prominent neither in British, nor Polish political crafts anyhow, yet here, Perlak’s second-language sentiments assert themselves profound.
Another theme might have been “austerity”. Glass studies of flowers by the Ecuadorian Ana Avas are too slight to mean much in Liverpool Cathedral’s Lady Chapel. A couple of blocks down the hill from this magisterial edifice, a display of trinkets and buttons in cookie tins by Anna Gonzales Noguchi adorns the window of a chemist’s. A passer-by would be excused for not understanding that this arrangement was an artwork. Should a curator be forgiven for turning it into one?
The days of grand gestures, such as Richard Wilson’s 2007 Turning the Place Over which spectacularly cut a circular hole in the façade of a disused Liverpool building, are over. Before romanticising their era of plentiful funding, one might consider its transparently instrumental nature. BEDROCK’s opening reception was sponsored by the Dutch embassy on account of the number of artists in the exhibition linked to the Netherlands. Cultural theorists today argue for understanding art as a “foundational economy”, yet the ideological strings of Dutch support went entirely unmarked.
Was “oblivion” one of McQuay’s keywords, then? She would have conceived of her project before the severity of the present cultural turn became obvious to everyone even outside of the art world. But the curator must have seen the disaster of the Biennial’s last edition which outright accused Liverpool of irreformable racism. In its light, the inclusion in this year’s festival of the work of Karen Tam is a gesture akin to a toddler screaming while pressing her palms to her ears. The Chinese-Canadian Tam filled a former housing association office in Liverpool’s Chinatown—the oldest in Europe—with a soft fabric installation mimicking the set of a traditional Cantonese opera. Scent of the Thunderbolts, a dig at “stereotypes”, was commissioned for a biennial in Toronto but is barely distinguishable from the decorations in the restaurants it neighbours in Liverpool. Despite, if not because of gaining the approval of local officials, this work is a cliché. Worse: it’s no more than a microaggression.
A handful of works in BEDROCK do speak to another reality. The video Dear Othermother by the Liverpool-born Amber Akaunu on show at the Bluecoat is a touching, if depressing, account of the strategies which communities adopt for survival. The film, made in a part of Liverpool where many households have only one parent, describes a matriarchal network of “chosen families”. Cutting in glum street scenes overlaid with Akaunu’s bewildered, adolescent conversations about parenthood, the film stops just short of affriming this contemporary settlement. That it claims that “it takes a village to raise a child” is an African proverb—rather than a truism understood by all Western societies until recently—can hardly be held against an artist less than thirty years of age.
Kara Chin’s Mapping the Wasteland: Pay and Display is another account of English life in decline. The work installed at FACT consists of multiple screens displaying an animated video game in which the common seaside town seagull is the protagonist. The bird prepares for a boxing fight, and the whole affair takes place in a car park spotted with debris and guano and which hasn’t seen a customer in years. That this scene relates to the artist’s adopted home of Newcastle, rather than her natal Singapore, is a sad given. Yet, reflecting such realities might be art’s one way of escaping its present stalemate.
Do artists, then, still need heavy practical and theoretical structures like biennials to coordinate and mediate their interests? Elizabeth Price’s video work HERE WE ARE is a graphic exploration of the links between the 19th-century surge of Catholicism in Britain and Irish and Italian immigration. The animated film, composed of architectural photographs of Modernist chapels such as the iconic concrete, ship-hull structure of Our Lady Star of the Sea on Angelsey, is an eloquent historical claim made by an artist unafraid to cite her sources. It takes Price’s experiences and the confidence of her Turner Prize win to make this abstract, yet foundational claim and surpass the institution’s platitudes.
At the Biennial’s opening, attendees bemoaned diminished funding and growing political hostility to their concerns, still convinced that an injection of cash and liberalising theory could restore 1998’s version of Beatlemania. But this isn’t the case. Focussing on the foundations deep under BEDROCK’s failed discovery mission will be their best bet.
Main Image: Elizabeth Price, still from HERE WE ARE, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
