A beautiful world in an age of turmoil
It is 20 years since the Liverpool Biennial, Britain’s largest festival of contemporary art, was established. During that time, the city’s fortunes have been transformed; a quick stroll along the Mersey waterfront reveals a booming metropolis. Ordinarily, this would be cause for celebration. But we are living in extraordinary times. Like many, the curators shaping this 10th edition of the biennial sense, in the world around them, “uncertainty” and “social, political and environmental turmoil”.
And so, their sombre overarching concept, which provides the title for the whole shebang, borrows from a poem written in 1788 by the German Friedrich Schiller, to ask: Beautiful world, where are you? Frankly, I’m not convinced the artists – more than 40 of them, from 22 different countries, exhibiting across the city – provide a coherent answer. But it is precisely the irregular character of this Liverpool Biennial that gives it such energy and dynamism, and demands it be seen.
If there is an unspoken theme, it is that non-western cultures are given special prominence. Tate Liverpool is a case in point. The ground floor hosts a spectacular installation, with folksy straw figures set in a psychedelic landscape to a soundtrack of birdsong and rushing water, by South Korean Haegue Yang. Upstairs, the indigenous Canadian Duane Linklater presents macabre sculptures of mink skins and fox stoles. Annie Pootoogook, the Inuk artist, who died in 2016, is honoured with a room displaying her faux-naif, coloured-pencil autobiographical drawings, documenting everyday Inuit life in Canada’s Arctic region.
Do these artists offer a vision of a “beautiful world”? One of Pootoogook’s matter-of-fact drawings details domestic abuse, while Linklater touches upon wastefulness and ecological catastrophe. At nearby Bluecoat, Variations on Ghost, a monumental, compressed-earth sculpture, by the Iranian-canadian Abbas Akhavan, presents the gargantuan talons of a protective Assyrian deity. Resembling the broken, Ozymandias-like remains of a colossal ancient statue, it is meant to evoke the destructive actions of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) over the past decade.
Beautiful world? Shattered world, more like. Culture, we are invited to remember, is a fragile thing.
This, too, is in part the message of George Osodi’s eye-catching photographic series Nigerian Monarchs, at Open Eye Gallery. Since 2012, Osodi has been producing portraits of the rulers of Nigeria’s different ethnic and cultural groups, kings and queens whose power was curtailed during the colonial period.
If you decide to visit, make sure you stop at new-media arts centre, FACT. Upstairs, Algerian Mohamed Bourouissa shows his unforgettable 2013 film Horse Day, in which black “horsemen” ride around a poor neighbourhood in Philadelphia, before staging an equestrian fair.
Downstairs, we find one of the biennial’s headline acts: a newly commissioned, three-channel video installation by the French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda.
Personally, I found it curiously void and outmoded – but the same cannot be said for her short 1982 film Ulysse, which is also being shown.
In this spellbinding work, Varda revisits a striking photograph that she took on a Calais beach in 1954, depicting a standing naked man, staring out to sea, a seated child and a dead goat. It’s a deft and moving disquisition upon the nature of memory and the passage of time.
Until Oct 28; Tickets: 0151 709 7444; biennial.com
Culture, we are invited to remember, is a fragile thing