Interest area: art

Liverpool Biennial is the UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art. The 12th edition is still open until 17 September 2023, giving viewers a last chance to see the excellent exhibitions.

There are a host of exhibitions still running, including ones at FACT, Tate Liverpool, Bluecoat and Tobacco Warehouse. Below are some of the festival highlights still open to view.

At FACT

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s ‘Respire (Liverpool)’ (2023) references the precarity of Black breathing and proposes breath as a means of individual and collective liberation.

Discover LuYang’s vast digital universe in their retro-futuristic arcade installation. Combining their own understanding of Buddhist teachings with aspects of neuroscience and digital technology, LuYang’s exhibition makes you question: how is a physical life different to a digital existence?

Join FACT for an evening of music and conversation centred around Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski’s Liverpool Biennial commission.

This event is inspired by the soundscape that Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski and Bassano Bonelli Bassano created in collaboration with participants from Liverpool who all work with their breath. The group includes actors, singers, teachers, activists, and therapists, amongst others.

At Tobacco Warehouse

In Unit 1, visual artist and poet Julien Creuzet presents a series of suspended abstract forms and intricate sculptures, grouped together to create a complex installation which threads together a range of source imagery including historical African sculptures, abstracted landscapes and compositions inspired by engravings and paintings.

Melanie Manchot’s new film project, ‘STEPHEN’ (2023), blurs the lines between fact and fiction to examine addiction and recovery. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, the film was created with a mixed cast of professional actors and local people from the recovery community.

Rahmi Hamzi’s painting, ‘Parasite’ (2021), emerges from her examination, deconstruction, and reconstruction of botanical shapes, creating associations with the human body, femininity, and sexuality.

Tate Liverpool

In the Wolfson Gallery, Torkwase Dyson’s abstract work ‘Liquid a Place’ (2021) is composed of three striking structural objects, which appear as both static and fluid simultaneously. The curved constructions are excavated by triangular voids within their centres, signifying a gateway, a shelter, or the sailing route upon which 2.4 million enslaved Africans lost their lives.

Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales presents several works from her ‘Holograms’ series (2020-2022), alongside a newly commissioned textile work, ‘Contradanza’ (2023). Both explore how fashion photography often copies and extracts from aesthetics and traditional dress of indigenous people and cultures for commercial purposes.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s ‘Disease Thrower’ series (2019) are autobiographical constructions which are at once sculptures, shrines, wearable headdresses, and healing instruments, reflecting on the artist’s own experiences as an undocumented migrant and cancer survivor.

Bluecoat

Kent Chan’s ‘Hot House’ (2020 – ongoing) is an installation and project space which questions the relationship between climates and cultures, and the influence of heat and humidity on our bodies and minds.

Benoît Piéron’s work deals with the uncertainty of life, death and immunity. His practice reappropriates and transfigures the medical environments and materials that surround him – hospital sheets and gowns, IV drips and waiting room furniture – to create something new, joyful, and full of life.

Raisa Kabir’s work, titled ‘Utterances: Our vessels for the stories, unspoken. Subaqueous violence. Sea. Ocean…’ (2016-present) encompasses woven text, textiles, sound, video, and performance to convey and visualise concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, its associated labour and networks of extraction.