With the programme for this year’s summer Biennial newly announced, we look at some of the best of what’s to come.
When it comes to art, is it ever possible to be both global and local? To do it for the town you call home yet tick the “internationally relevant” box too? It’s a hard trick to pull off. Glasgow International manages it. The Whitworth may, when it reopens. And it appears that Liverpool Biennial is also staking a claim to be a visual arts festival that is most definitely of the city it calls home – yet without straying too close to the line which, should you cross it, means that visitors start being asked if they are, you know, local.
To be fair, Liverpool should be able to play the global/local card with all the ease of a superstar DJ at a homecoming gig. This, after all, is a port city whose fortunes were founded on the docks that turned it, for a while at least, into the world’s maritime darling. Liverpool Biennial, meanwhile, has always made a point of bringing international artists and curators to a city whose own arts scene is good and strong: Liverpool is home to an outpost of Tate, not to mention the Walker, Bluecoat, FACT and the Open Eye.
While it has international form, the programme for this year’s Biennial, shifted to a summer slot and the first solely under the stewardship of director Sally Tallant, keeps up the local end of the deal. Its opening weekend features a new work by one of Britain’s most inventive composers, Michael Nyman. His Symphony No. 11: Hillsborough Memorial will sound through the soaring spaces of Liverpool Cathedral; it’s a work that will be heart-wrenchingly poignant. Though Hillsborough belongs to Liverpool, it is a disaster scorched onto the mind’s eye of anyone who grew up in 1980’s Britain.
The mind-bending designs of dazzle ships weren’t created to hide so much as to confuse the enemy
Alongside regular events such as the John Moores Painting Prize, Carlos Cruz-Diez sets out to recreate a 1918 painting called Dazzle-ship in Drydock at Liverpool. Painted with bizarre stripes and patterns, “dazzle ships” were common during World War One, each one employing a kind of camouflage whose mind-bending designs weren’t created to hide a ship so much as to confuse the enemy as to its speed, position and direction. It’s fitting, then, that an artist who made his name in the 1950s and 1960s creating kinetic and optic art comes to Liverpool to create an artistic version of a dazzle ship. The Edmund Gardner vessel will sit in a dry dock close to Tate Liverpool, part of the city’s take on the WWI commemorations.
Other unusual venues also come into play during the festival. A weekend in September dedicated to performance art sees it taken into the most mundane of spaces: artists perform in cafes, in a chemist’s, even at bus stops. But the headline act here is surely the former Trade Union building on Hardman Street. Pressed into re-use as one of the host galleries of multi-site exhibition, A Needle Walks into a Haystack, this 19th-century neo-Classic lovely, sitting opposite the Philharmonic (the pub on one side, the hall on the other), has its own artistic pedigree. The 1932 extension contains carvings by the sculptor John Skeaping – they allude to its use as a school for the blind – while the original interior dome was, in 1986, covered in images of socialist Liverpool by the painter Mike Jones (a reference to the building’s then-use as a TUC).
A Needle Walks into a Haystack, meanwhile, stretches out across the city, from FACT to Tate Liverpool via the Bluecoat. The modernist architect Claude Parent gets busy with ramps and wonky floors in Tate Liverpool’s Wolfson Gallery, creating a new way of seeing works from the Tate’s collection by the likes of Anni Albers, Gillian Wise and Gustav Metzger. The US filmmaker Sharon Lockhart gives her first UK solo show at FACT, while elsewhere a humble city centre flat becomes the venue for screenings that take the work of experimental Belgian TV director Jef Cornelis as the starting point for ruminations on the often symbiotic relationship between TV, film and art.
In an interesting development, the Biennial extends the hand of friendship to its northerly neighbours this time round, via a programme that supplies edited highlights as to what else is on in the North West over the summer: its “Listed” programme is now up and running. It’s a small but fitting gesture for a festival that has the confidence to be generous, and to recognise that good neighbours and collaborators come in local, regional and international form.