Liverpool Biennial 2016
09 Jul - 16 Oct 2016
LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2016
Liverpool Biennial 2016 explores fictions, stories and histories, taking viewers on a series of voyages through time and space, drawing on Liverpool’s past, present and future. These journeys take the form of six ‘episodes’: Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children’s Episode, Software, Monuments from the Future and Flashback. They are sited in galleries, public spaces, unused buildings, through live performance and online. Many of the artists have made work for more than one episode, some works are repeated across different episodes, and some venues host more than one episode.
Ancient Greece
In the early 1800s, architects such as John Foster and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes built Liverpool’s neoclassical cityscape as a second version of Ancient Greece. This allowed the rising elite of merchants who benefitted from colonial trade and the industrial revolution to fashion themselves, and their civic commitment, as a reenactment of the legendary cradle of democracy. In the Walker Art Gallery there is a watercolour by Samuel Austin, made in 1826, that continues this fiction. Depicting Carthage in ancient times, Austin uses Liverpool’s neoclassical buildings as a backdrop. This collapsing of space, time and stories mirrors the way in which the Ancient Greeks imagined and depicted their own myths on friezes and vessels. They didn’t tell stories with a beginning, middle and end, but depicted many stories in parallel, showing how multiple things happen at once, on a single plane.
China Town
Liverpool’s Chinatown has existed since the late 1890s and is the oldest in Europe. Its entrance is marked by a traditional arch imported from Shanghai. In the same way that the city’s merchant class linked itself to Ancient Greece through neoclassical architecture, this arch links Liverpool’s Chinese community to an image of home. Chinese immigration was, as with many migratory fluxes today, motivated by geographical labour demands and like the Greek fiction beneficial to Liverpool’s ruling class, Chinatown was beneficial to sailors and workers from a different continent. But as China itself changes, this architectural arch also shifts meaning. Many now see Chinatown as a nostalgic image of something that has become more dispersed, and that might even exist primarily in online networks, or through economic investment. Throughout Liverpool Biennial 2016, echoes of these different Chinatowns resound in spaces across the city.
Children's Episode
Children imagine the space between fiction and reality differently from adults, sometimes making no distinction between the two. They experiment with forms of social organisation constructed by adults, inventing new rules, and simultaneously creating new futures. For the Children’s Episode, artists have been invited to consider children as the primary audience: sometimes making work with them, sometimes for them.
Monuments from the Future
For this episode, artists have been asked to assume the role of futurologists. They were invited to imagine what Liverpool might look like in 20, 30 or 40 years, and to design a monument for these scenarios. As a result, a series of public art commissions travel across time, appearing to be from the future but situated in the present.
Flashback
A flashback is a way of experiencing history as it punctuates the present unexpectedly. Flashbacks can rupture established narratives and provide new understandings of the past. For instance, a building designed with the image of Ancient Greece in mind can help tell a story about another city thousands of years later, and the emergence of childhood memories in adulthood can help the understanding of new social realities. In this episode, which was prompted by a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko, artists interpret flashbacks through film and the exhibiting of artefacts that travel through time from a different reality to interrupt our own.
Software
Software is usually considered as something functional, such as programmes, instructions or rules that direct the computer to perform specific operations, but it can also open a portal to other dimensions and imagined worlds. This episode points towards a broader understanding of software beyond technical application to ideas of scores and choreographies, through which one thing affects another without practical outcome. These scripts, running through the Biennial, generate additional and unexpected content and behaviour, create parallel understandings of art and life, and expand and produce new social forms and possible worlds. The episode opens up perspectives and aesthetic experiences for ‘users’, activating multiple portals that offer the ability to leap from one world to another, from everyday reality to the ‘nethersphere’ of computation and abstraction.
Curated by Sally Tallant, Dominic Willsdon, Francesco Manacorda, Raimundas Malasauskas, Joasia Krysa, Rosie Cooper, Polly Brannan and Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey
Artists
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Andreas Angelidakis
Simeon Barclay
Alisa Baremboym
Jacqueline Bebb
Lucy Beech
Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones
Lindsey Bull
Robert Carter & Lauren Velvick
Mariana Castillo Deball
Yin-Ju Chen
Ian Cheng
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd
Nina Chua
Céline Condorelli
Audrey Cottin
Matthew Crawley
Koenraad Dedobbeleer
Frances Disley
Jason Dodge
Lara Favaretto
Daniel Fogarty
Danielle Freakley
Coco Fusco
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh & Hesam Rahmanian
Hato
Ana Jotta
Samson Kambalu
Oliver Laric
Mark Leckey
Adam Linder
Marcos Lutyens
Jumana Manna
Rita McBride
Dennis McNulty
Harry Meadley
Elena Narbutaitė
Lu Pingyuan
Michael Portnoy
Sahej Rahal
Stephen Sheehan
Koki Tanaka
Suzanne Treister
Villa Design Group
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Betty Woodman
Arseny Zhilyaev
Liverpool Biennial 2016 explores fictions, stories and histories, taking viewers on a series of voyages through time and space, drawing on Liverpool’s past, present and future. These journeys take the form of six ‘episodes’: Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children’s Episode, Software, Monuments from the Future and Flashback. They are sited in galleries, public spaces, unused buildings, through live performance and online. Many of the artists have made work for more than one episode, some works are repeated across different episodes, and some venues host more than one episode.
Ancient Greece
In the early 1800s, architects such as John Foster and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes built Liverpool’s neoclassical cityscape as a second version of Ancient Greece. This allowed the rising elite of merchants who benefitted from colonial trade and the industrial revolution to fashion themselves, and their civic commitment, as a reenactment of the legendary cradle of democracy. In the Walker Art Gallery there is a watercolour by Samuel Austin, made in 1826, that continues this fiction. Depicting Carthage in ancient times, Austin uses Liverpool’s neoclassical buildings as a backdrop. This collapsing of space, time and stories mirrors the way in which the Ancient Greeks imagined and depicted their own myths on friezes and vessels. They didn’t tell stories with a beginning, middle and end, but depicted many stories in parallel, showing how multiple things happen at once, on a single plane.
China Town
Liverpool’s Chinatown has existed since the late 1890s and is the oldest in Europe. Its entrance is marked by a traditional arch imported from Shanghai. In the same way that the city’s merchant class linked itself to Ancient Greece through neoclassical architecture, this arch links Liverpool’s Chinese community to an image of home. Chinese immigration was, as with many migratory fluxes today, motivated by geographical labour demands and like the Greek fiction beneficial to Liverpool’s ruling class, Chinatown was beneficial to sailors and workers from a different continent. But as China itself changes, this architectural arch also shifts meaning. Many now see Chinatown as a nostalgic image of something that has become more dispersed, and that might even exist primarily in online networks, or through economic investment. Throughout Liverpool Biennial 2016, echoes of these different Chinatowns resound in spaces across the city.
Children's Episode
Children imagine the space between fiction and reality differently from adults, sometimes making no distinction between the two. They experiment with forms of social organisation constructed by adults, inventing new rules, and simultaneously creating new futures. For the Children’s Episode, artists have been invited to consider children as the primary audience: sometimes making work with them, sometimes for them.
Monuments from the Future
For this episode, artists have been asked to assume the role of futurologists. They were invited to imagine what Liverpool might look like in 20, 30 or 40 years, and to design a monument for these scenarios. As a result, a series of public art commissions travel across time, appearing to be from the future but situated in the present.
Flashback
A flashback is a way of experiencing history as it punctuates the present unexpectedly. Flashbacks can rupture established narratives and provide new understandings of the past. For instance, a building designed with the image of Ancient Greece in mind can help tell a story about another city thousands of years later, and the emergence of childhood memories in adulthood can help the understanding of new social realities. In this episode, which was prompted by a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko, artists interpret flashbacks through film and the exhibiting of artefacts that travel through time from a different reality to interrupt our own.
Software
Software is usually considered as something functional, such as programmes, instructions or rules that direct the computer to perform specific operations, but it can also open a portal to other dimensions and imagined worlds. This episode points towards a broader understanding of software beyond technical application to ideas of scores and choreographies, through which one thing affects another without practical outcome. These scripts, running through the Biennial, generate additional and unexpected content and behaviour, create parallel understandings of art and life, and expand and produce new social forms and possible worlds. The episode opens up perspectives and aesthetic experiences for ‘users’, activating multiple portals that offer the ability to leap from one world to another, from everyday reality to the ‘nethersphere’ of computation and abstraction.
Curated by Sally Tallant, Dominic Willsdon, Francesco Manacorda, Raimundas Malasauskas, Joasia Krysa, Rosie Cooper, Polly Brannan and Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey
Artists
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Andreas Angelidakis
Simeon Barclay
Alisa Baremboym
Jacqueline Bebb
Lucy Beech
Sarah Browne and Jesse Jones
Lindsey Bull
Robert Carter & Lauren Velvick
Mariana Castillo Deball
Yin-Ju Chen
Ian Cheng
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd
Nina Chua
Céline Condorelli
Audrey Cottin
Matthew Crawley
Koenraad Dedobbeleer
Frances Disley
Jason Dodge
Lara Favaretto
Daniel Fogarty
Danielle Freakley
Coco Fusco
Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni
Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh & Hesam Rahmanian
Hato
Ana Jotta
Samson Kambalu
Oliver Laric
Mark Leckey
Adam Linder
Marcos Lutyens
Jumana Manna
Rita McBride
Dennis McNulty
Harry Meadley
Elena Narbutaitė
Lu Pingyuan
Michael Portnoy
Sahej Rahal
Stephen Sheehan
Koki Tanaka
Suzanne Treister
Villa Design Group
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Betty Woodman
Arseny Zhilyaev