LIVERPOOL — Bedrock gives a multilayered theme for the 2025 Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest free up to date artwork competition. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay notes in a catalog essay that it explores three overlapping strands: The town’s underlying sandstone foundations, which have additionally formed its structure; fashionable layers constructed during times of industrialization, colonization, and the transatlantic slave commerce; and, lastly, the town’s various demographics and the locations they cohabit right now. The theme’s efficiency is, nevertheless, impaired by the presence of many underwhelming artworks, a few of which really feel weak in isolation whereas others come throughout as speculative responses to the theme.
For starters, the 30 taking part artists are scattered throughout 14 venues and 4 outside installations, with many presenting a couple of work. Regardless of Liverpool being a walkable metropolis, the staging feels too fragmented. Tate Liverpool’s present closure for renovations has robbed the organizers of an anchoring venue. The positioning that comes closest is Bluecoat, the place McQuay headed the programming from 2015 to 2022. Her familiarity with the area turns out to be useful as she cohesively presents a set of works that study familial ties, id, and heritage.
DARCH, “Heaven in the Ground” (2025), audio, ceramics, soil
Extremely, solely one of many artists within the biennial has enduring ties to the town. Offered at Bluecoat, Liverpool-born Amber Akaunu’s documentary “Dear Othermother” (2025) shines via in its authenticity. It’s a heartfelt examination of single motherhood, intergenerational bonds, and unconventional friendships within the Toxteth neighborhood. The movie is deeply tied to the social cloth, provided that this space traditionally harbored individuals of African and Caribbean ancestry, and one out of six households there right now is headed by a single mom. A number of different artists have additionally created significant participatory initiatives involving the area people. By workshops, the Somali-Indian collaboration DARCH surfaces religious traditions across the demise and grieving utilizing soil as medium and metaphor. Dublin-based Alice Rekab’s vibrant vinyl murals “Bunchlann / Buncharriag” (2025), co-created with school college students, discover assertions of immigrant identities amongst younger individuals.
Nevertheless, at many venues, the works fail to engender significant dialogue in congruence or distinction, regardless of the curatorial assertions. Take Turkish artist Cevdet Erek’s “Away Terrace (Us and Them)” (2025) at 20 Jordan Road — a sprawling however drab set up with pulsating sounds mimicking the in-stadia buzz of a soccer match. It’s introduced alongside Imayna Caceres’s assortment of handmade clay sculptures whose natural world motifs commemorate pre-Columbian data methods associated to their Peruvian heritage. The curatorial suggestion that each artists discover “foundational references from the city including football stadia and naturally occurring materials” comes throughout as unconvincing.
Alice Rekab, “Bunchlann/Buncharriag” (Origin Household/Bedrock in Irish Gaelic) (2025), outside vinyl set up
On the Walker Artwork Gallery, the group exhibit is tucked away in a secluded cul-de-sac and fails to forcefully critique the museum’s colonial legacy. Subsequent door, on the grand Liverpool Central Library, Eritrea-born Dawit L. Petros’s “As the Nile Flows or the Camel Walks” (2025) may also be laborious to find or viscerally have interaction with. His set up attracts on colonial archives to reimagine a British-Canadian navy expedition within the Eighteen Eighties.
In distinction, looking for Kara Chin’s tiles set into the sidewalks on Berry Road is like an pleasing easter egg hunt. Her multimedia set up at a close-by venue additionally scores for its playful use of city fixtures like seagulls, parking meters, and non-native crops to make a broader level about adaptation and resilience.
The Biennial’s outreach within the metropolis’s Chinatown, the oldest in Europe, is noteworthy for intent however fails to strike a deeper resonance. Montreal-based Karen Tam’s recreation of a Cantonese opera stage ponders how diasporic reminiscence preserves histories weak to erasure, but it surely feels extra like a generic import than a dialog about Liverpudlian-Chinese language immigrant experiences. Taiwanese artist ChihChung Chang’s Imperial Arch-shaped mural, “Keystone” (2025), did contain native residents in its making. What’s lacking is a penetrating examination of the discrimination that the group has suffered up to now, such because the compelled repatriation of Chinese language seamen after the Second World Battle, which tore aside mixed-race households and was not acknowledged correctly till many years after.
Set up view of Karen Tam, “Scent of Thunderbolts” (2024), combined media
One of many better-known British names on view is Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Value. Her movie “Here We Are” (2025), which pulls a correlation between waves of immigration in postwar Britain and the proliferation of Catholic modernist church buildings, works properly because it spotlights a key side of how Irish immigration has given the town its distinct cultural ethos.
Crowds had been surprisingly sparse once I visited key venues just like the Open Eye Gallery and Tate’s pop-up area. In distinction, the Beatles statue on the close by Pier Head and the Royal Albert Dock had been teeming. Whereas the town continues to financial institution on its transport heritage, favourite foursome, and soccer to attract in additional guests, the biennial wants to determine other ways to realize relevance. Unearthing native inventive voices, fostering extra participatory gestures, and radically participating with the town’s checkered previous should proceed to be a part of the reply.
Shiela Hicks, “Grand Boules” (2009), wooden, silk, cotton, linen, artificial textiles, plastic, and metallic
Cevdet Erek, “Away Terrace (Us and Them)” (2025), sculptural and sonic set up; bricks fabricated from clay and barley straws, pigments, timber, 10-channel audio
Odur Ronald, “Muly’Ato Lima” (Multi functional boat in Luganda-Bantu language) (2025); aluminum passports, chairs, jerry cans and woven mat
Set up view of Nandan Ghiya, “Manthan” (Churning/Introspection in Hindi) (2025), combined media
The 2025 Liverpool Biennial: Bedrock continues at a number of venues throughout Liverpool via September 14. The biennial was curated by Marie-Anne McQuay.
