The Liverpool Biennial 2025 is full of intriguing insights rather than big show-stopping moments

Liverpool’s dramatic topography, with its giant modern-Gothic cathedral looming over the steeply pitching streets and the mouth of the Mersey, coupled with a wealth of unusual exhibition spaces, makes it the perfect setting for Britain’s biggest free international art festival – the nearest thing we have to the mighty Venice Biennale. Alongside these vital physical elements, there’s also Liverpool’s inimitable “character”: the sense of communality and solidarity that makes it perhaps Britain’s most distinctive city.

Since its inception in 1998, the Liverpool Biennial has been pioneering in opening up quirky spaces from vast wharf-side warehouses to abandoned nightclubs and a 1950s telephone exchange for displays of cutting-edge art from around the world. Yet despite several attempts to draw themes from the history and cultural background of the city, the Liverpudlianness – OK, the scouseness – of the city has remained underexplored in this increasingly important cultural event.

The 2023 biennial, “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things”, curated by South Africa’s Khanyisile Mbongwa, called on artists to employ ancestral and indigenous wisdom to heal the psychic wounds caused by Liverpool’s involvement in slavery and colonialism. While the result was one of the liveliest biennials, many questioned its relevance to Liverpool as it exists today.

So the news that this year’s incarnation, “Bedrock”, curated by born and still-resident scouser Marie-Anne McQuay, would be “inspired by the physical and social foundations of Liverpool” – specifically the vein of sandstone running beneath the city – “and the people, places and values that ground us”, suggests that the organisers have listened to the word on the street. But if that creates expectations of an event imbued with the kind of proudly local culture embodied by Gerry Marsden (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”), Phil Redmond (“Brookside”) and Cilla Black (“Worra lorra laffs”), think again.

The first works encountered on arriving at Lime Street Station, in the great Victorian municipal gallery, the Walker, are in a rather generic, craft-oriented, climate-concerned magic realist vein that has become the staple of biennales and biennials across the world over the past few years. Jennifer Tee’s elaborate tulip petal collages are infused with stylised animal imagery drawn from her Dutch and Chinese-Indonesian background. Irish artist Isabel Nolan’s sumptuously patterned hand-tufted carpets playfully reference medieval Italian painting, while Katarzyna Perlak’s huge “tapestry” suspended from the ceiling looks like it’s constructed from unfolded shopping bags, embedded with pages from Polish tabloid newspapers and hand-embroidered slogans of which “It is not time to regret roses when forests are burnt,” is a typical example.

open image in gallery

There’s the sense that the festival’s focus on the “bedrock” of heritage, community and foundational values will be interpreted according to the artists’ own cultural imperatives, with only tangential reference to Liverpool’s own “indigenous” way of life. We could almost be back where we were with “uMoya” two years ago.

The biennial’s parallel focus on “the sense of loss that comes from the ongoing legacies of colonialism and empire so formative to Liverpool’s foundation” also feels more than a shade predictable. This territory has been so extensively mined in the wake of Black Lives Matter that it yields little more from the public these days than a mild shrug of regret. Yet Eritrean-Canadian artist Dawit L Patros, the only one of the invitees to have taken up the biennial’s challenge of “taking inspiration from Liverpool’s archives and histories” has unearthed an extraordinary narrative in the library of Liverpool’s exclusive Athenaeum club, involving an 1884 expedition to rescue Major-General Charles Gordon, doomed head of the British garrison in the Sudanese capital Khartoum. Large numbers of Native Canadian “indigenous” Mohawks were employed to teach shipping skills to “indigenous” locals who had been negotiating the Nile and its tributaries for millennia.

The tragicomic potential of this ill-starred imperial episode, explored by Patros through books, soundworks and quirky surreal sculptures at Liverpool’s magnificent Victorian Central Library, has the capacity, in his words, “to destabilise neat framings of colonial dynamics and their participants”. It is that “neatness”, and a degree of pat worthiness, which tends to inflect artistic responses to colonialism and turn the public off. So it’s refreshing to see these issues recognised by an artist of northeast African heritage who was raised on the plains of Canada and is well-placed to identify with all those involved in the situations he describes.

open image in gallery

“Bedrock” really starts to come into its own at the Bluecoat Gallery, in the middle of the city’s shopping area, where the work takes on an earthier, more street-level feel. Pride of place goes to Amber Akaunu, a Liverpool-born Nigerian-German filmmaker and artist, who is unbelievably the first “local” artist to have taken part in a Liverpool Biennial. Dear OtherMother, her touching film on a single mothers’ group in the long-embattled Toxteth area, coupled with a display on Yoruba naming ceremonies, brings it home that communal support and therapy sessions and “alternative matriarchal networks” are part of a thriving framework of contemporary collective ritual. And it’s all played out in broad Scouse accents.

Dublin-based Alice Rakab’s installations involving large-scale paintings, floor-based clay works and found objects responding to her neurodiverse, non-binary identity and Irish/Sierra Leonean background, give an invigorating sense of having been improvised in the gallery. This is compounded by the floor-to-ceiling windows that seem to bring the crowds of passing shoppers bodily into the space.

This is a festival of intriguing insights and revelations rather than big show-stopping moments. Spread over a wider geographical area than any other Liverpool Biennial, it’s designed to be taken in by “walking the city”. It includes both cathedrals (the Sixties-Modern RC and the Gothic Anglican), a Chinese community centre with a quirky installation on amateur productions of Chinese opera (the fact that they took place in Montreal rather than Liverpool doesn’t seem to matter), and a film by Elizabeth Price in the Black-E, a magnificent neoclassical church, which is now a community centre. Price is the only well-known British artist to participate this year, and if the subject of her animated film – the influence of immigrant communities on post-war British Roman Catholic architecture – feels no less niche after you’ve seen it, it’s still a great watch.

The show-stopping elements in this “walking biennial” are provided by Liverpool itself. From the magnificent Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian collections at the Walker Art Gallery to the sheer jaw-dropping scale of the Anglican cathedral, Liverpool today feels like a great cultural city, as was intended by the Victorian founders of its great institutions, though with a more diverse, informal, egalitarian feel. Times may be tough, but I’ve never seen Liverpool, once regarded as Britain’s most embattled city, glowing the way it does these days.

At various venues around Liverpool until 14 September