Liverpool Biennial 2023 Review: Art & City Focus
- Once dubbed the "New York of Europe," Liverpool continues to leave a mark on art and culture.
- Titled "BEDROCK," the biennial opened earlier this month with an evocative theme asking artists and visitors to contend with foundations and energy.
- For Marie-Anne McQuay, guest curator and a long-time Liverpool resident, "bedrock" can channel several ideas.
Explore the heart of art and culture in Liverpool with the 2025 Biennial, a vibrant showcase of contemporary art.This year’s “BEDROCK” theme delves into foundations, energy, and the city’s complex history. Discover impactful installations by artists like Maria Loizidou and Elizabeth Price, examining migration, identity, and the evolving face of Liverpool. This cultural event,the largest free contemporary art event in the U.K., features dozens of new commissions across the city. News Directory 3 provides a look at the social impact of the art. What does the future hold for Liverpool’s art scene? Discover what’s next…
Maria Loizidou,
Where Am I Now?
, 2025; at Liverpool Cathedral.
Photo: Mark McNulty
Once dubbed the “New York of Europe,” Liverpool continues to leave a mark on art and culture. From a notable 18th-century imperial port city to the beating heart of rock band
counterculture in the 1960s and the seat of a vibrant soccer passion, this city contains many lives and faces, a magnetic lifeforce honored at this year’s edition of the Liverpool
Biennial, the largest free contemporary art event in the U.K.
Titled “BEDROCK,” the biennial opened earlier this month with an evocative theme asking artists and visitors to contend with foundations and energy. For its 2025 edition, the biennial
presents the works of thirty artists and collectives, including dozens of new commissions, in eighteen sites across Liverpool, less than three hours from London by train.
For Marie-Anne McQuay, guest curator and a long-time Liverpool resident, “bedrock” can channel several ideas. McQuay headed programs at Bluecoat, a local art institution and one of
the biennial’s sites. In her curatorial statement, she explains her interpretation of the term, linking it to geology, soil and long, mythical time. Bedrock also nods to the city’s
“civic values haunted by empire” and the vital social as well as physical bedrock that spaces and loved ones provide us. As such, bedrock is a concept articulated in time and space,
disputing notions of center, periphery and linearity.
We quickly understand thru this curation that Liverpool contains more than the sum of its parts. McQuay restituted liverpool’s stature as a significant crossroad,a global meeting
point,a place of deep,non-linear connections and dialogues. Historically, the city’s wealth was largely derived from its entanglements with the transatlantic slave trade and other
economic extractions during the British Empire. Today, its richness is made fuller by hosting some of the oldest Black and Chinese communities in Europe and being a recent home for new
immigrants boosting the city with new accents and multicultural dynamism.
Mounira Al Solh,
I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous
, 2012-ongoing.
Courtesy of the Artist
For such an outward-facing city, it’s no surprise that migration and its ramifications feature so prominently across many of the biennial’s artworks. In Liverpool’s imposing cathedral
we stagger upon Maria Loizidou’s
Where Am I Now?
(2025), a scintillating installation of monumental scale showing handwoven migratory birds rescuing fallen humans-asylum seekers-nodding not onyl to the human tragedy unfolding in the
Mediterranean Sea close to Loizidou’s home of Cyprus but also to the legacies of the diverse migrants who have transformed Liverpool over time. Questioning our relationship with borders
and freedom, loizidou represents mythological birds such as the ibis as well as local species. This depiction of salvation and sanctuary seamlessly blends into the Cathedral’s
architecture.
Elizabeth Price’s film
HERE WE ARE
(2025), shown a few steps away from the Cathedral, also speaks to the way that migration imprints beliefs and physical structures. The video essay looks at the modernist architecture of
Catholic churches in Britain and their underpinning communities-the Irish, an instrumental workforce during WWII, notably in arms factories and Africans more recently. The 2012
Turner Prize winner asks to what extent a building’s physical layers can be removed from its double and frequently enough ambiguous lens of community differentiation and belonging at a time of
mainstream anti-migrant politics in the U.K.
In Liverpool’s old Chinatown, diasporic artists engage with representations and memory. ChihChung Chang’s wall mural
Keystone
(2025) reclaims public space and forms a visual continuum with the city’s Imperial Arch, the largest arch outside China and a manifesto for commune-like popular art. Meanwhile,
Canadian artist Karen tam activates pine Court, a 1986 housing association, with an immersive installation recreating Chinese opera backstage and props (
Scent of Thunderbolts 雷霆之息
, 2024). The latter integrates so perfectly in the association’s venue that it acts as a trompe l’oeil at first, embodying the spirit of artifice found in theater and entertainment.
Odur Ronald,
‘MulyAto Limu All in One Boat
, 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Bluecoat.
Photography by Mark McNulty
At Bluecoat, Odur Ronald presents
‘MulyAto Limu All in One Boat
(2025), an installation made of aluminum chairs and floating metal books arranged in a dim gallery space, representing fictional passports and the trauma of forced migration. The work
speaks to the artist’s own experience of displacement and the broader realities of refugees and asylum seekers.
The biennial also extends to the streets of Liverpool, with public art installations that engage with the city’s history and identity.
Liverpool Mountain
(2018), a colorful sculpture by Ugo Rondinone, stands as a beacon of creativity and a symbol of the city’s vibrant art scene.
The Liverpool Biennial 2025 offers a compelling exploration of the themes of bedrock, migration, and identity, inviting visitors to engage with the city’s rich history and diverse
communities. Through a range of media and perspectives, the artists in the biennial create a dialog about the foundations that shape our world and the forces that drive us to seek new
horizons.