Exhibition of the week Liverpool Biennial 2018

Various venues across Liverpool (0151-709 7444, www.biennial.com). Until 28 October

“It is 20 years since the Liverpool Biennial, Britain’s largest festival of contemporary art, was established,” said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The city itself has flourished since then: a walk down its once-neglected waterfront reveals a “booming metropolis” – yet this thoughtful anniversary edition of the biennial is a distinctly “sombre” affair. Entitled Beautiful world, where

are you? (a line from a Friedrich Schiller poem), it brings together the work of 44 artists from 22 countries, spread across the city’s venues. It has a distinct focus on the political, economic and environmental uncertainty of the present day: at the Bluecoat arts centre, Iranian-canadian Abbas Akhavan presents a sculptural display based on Islamic State’s destruction of ancient statuary; at Tate Liverpool, one of the late Annie Pootoogook’s drawings depicts domestic abuse in an Inuit community, while her fellow Canadian Duane Linklater’s “macabre” sculptures hint at “ecological catastrophe”. Cheery it isn’t, but this festival has “energy and dynamism” in spades.

There’s much to admire here, said Rachel Cooke in The Observer. At the Open Eye Gallery, you will find “fantastic” portraits of Nigerian regional rulers by the photographer George Osodi. In the Gothic edifice of the Victoria Gallery and Museum, “tiled staircases and high Victorian fireplaces” form a backdrop to Aslan Gaisumov’s “powerful” film recounting the horrors of Stalin’s forced deportation of Chechen and Ingush people to Central Asia. Better still is veteran French director Agnès Varda’s film Ulysse, a “small masterpiece” exploring our unreliable relationship to memory. Nevertheless, the biennial’s morose tone can get “wearying”. Indeed, some of the installations at Tate Liverpool are so “hectoring” that you “half wonder if you haven’t stumbled into a bad degree show”.

It’s not all doom and gloom, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Indeed, there is genuine “emotional warmth” to this festival. It deals with big, troubling subjects in a quiet and unsensational way, at times offering hope for the future. A case in point is a project by the British artist Ryan Gander, who encouraged local schoolchildren to design new benches for a public square behind Liverpool Cathedral. The results are “terrible for sitting on”, but “excellent evidence” of young creativity. Unlike other biennials, Liverpool’s has always been a “welcome event”, gathering “relative unknowns” from distant corners of the international art world. Happily, this year’s effort is no different.