Liverpool Biennial 2021

Liverpool Biennial 2021

Dates: 20 Mar 2021 - 05 Jun 2021

Location: Liverpool City Centre

With many feeling we’ve experienced a ‘lost year’, hope is something we need as we enter 2021. We also need culture which, felt empty in 2020.

As a new year looms a 12 week artistic event is expected to reflect the previous year and have some innovative art work for all to enjoy. 

The Liverpool Biennial will make it’s 11th edition from spring 2021. It will run from 20th March - 6th June with previews held on 18th and 19th March.

It will be an inspiring programme of commissioned exhibitions, screenings, sculpture and sound, celebrating the city’s most iconic buildings and architecture. 

Here are some of the highlights coming to the North West city:-

  • Neo Muyanga’s newly commissioned project ‘A Maze in Graze’- a video installation at the Lewis’s building. Muyanga’s reinterpretation of “Amazing Grace” connects the origins of the song to its murkier history, and to Liverpool’s – John Newton lived in the city and sailed on slave ships from Liverpool’s port.
  • Black Obsidian Sound System’s new commission- an audio-visual installation to be shown at FACT. An immersive environment, combining film, light, a sound score and sculpture, the work is an extension of a new short film project A Collective Hum by B.O.S.S, commissioned by Lux.
  • Ebony G. Patterson presents three hand embellished textile works at Tate Liverpool, including …fraught…for those who bear/bare witness (2018), and …in loving memory…for those who bear/bare witness (2018), as well as a new floor work. Patterson is concerned with historical representations of marginalized bodies, and capturing, mourning and glorifying the passing of their lives.

Those who attend the programme will expect to see six new public realm artworks from Larry Achiampong, Teresa Solar, Erick Beltran, Linder, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Rashid Johnson.

January 2021 will see the press release of performances and events scheduled for the 11th edition. 

In addition, the early quarter of next year will see a series of exhibitions that run alongside the Liverpool Biennial programme. 

Highlights include:-

  • ‘AI: More Than Human’ exhibition (Barbican 2019) arriving at the World Museum on January 22. 
  • The UK’s biggest painting competition, The John Moores Painting Prize, opens at the Walker Art Gallery on February 12. 
  • Aliza Nisenbaum’s paintings of Merseyside’s NHS Frontline workers will be unveiled at Tate Liverpool on Dec 15. 

All exhibitions run until the final week of June. Running alongside the Biennial, FACT will also present a solo presentation of the Liverpool-based artist Kiara Mohamed, including a new moving image work, and curated by Fauziya Johnson.

Liverpool Biennial will once again be releasing a collection of limited edition prints by selected artists when the festival opens in March 2021.

Sam Lackey, Interim Director of Liverpool Biennial, has these closing words ahead of the much anticipated programme,

“The city is known for being an epicentre of social and cultural exchange, through connecting communities and artists and continually reshaping its global identity by steadfastly investing in arts and culture. We are committed to working together with our partners in the city to redesign and remodel events, to enable us to put on a show in the city and to broadcast across the world. By continuing to support artists and draw more world class talent and artworks to Liverpool, we hope to inspire the creators of the future.”

^Alex Ashworth CCG Art Blogger