With less than a month to go, here is the ‘long-awaited’ Spanner
in the Workz highlights of the Liverpool Biennial 2018!
The
Biennial 2018 celebrates its 10th programme of what is overall
twenty years of arts across the city and region. It also personally marks my
fifth Biennial from when I first visited Liverpool as an art student in 2008.
It has become a tradition to visit and feel quite sentimental about loyally
making the pilgrimage to the north every two years via a series of (increasingly
unreliable) trains searching for what new contemporary national and
international art in some of Liverpool’s most remarkable buildings, galleries
and spaces has in store. There is also a case for the Liverpool bar that sells
triple gins for £3, but perhaps the less said of that the better....!
 |
| (detail) Mae-ling Lokko's installation 'Hack the Root' 2018 |
In
response to the collective theme, ‘Beautiful World Where Are You?’
artists and audiences are invited ‘to reflect on a world in turmoil’. It
sounds serious and whilst I do not question that the world, politically,
environmentally, socially and economically is in a tumultuous and uncertain
period, I found much of what resonated with me in this year’s Biennial to be
conscientiously uplifting and more hopeful or engagingly activist in the face
of such challenges. Works such as Mae-ling Lokko’s ‘Hack the Root’,
presented at RIBA North Architectural Centre deals with the turmoil of
food-waste and unsustainability of materials for building by proposing a
creative solution whereby agrowaste-fed mycelium (mushroom) have been
cultivated into modular biomaterial building panels. Shown is a video that
explains this process alongside the tiles themselves, a growing chamber and
prototypes of structures which could be built from this material. I had no idea
mushrooms could be used in this way and am excited that work artists are still using science to creatively problem solve and generate new ideas.
 |
| (still) Madiha Aijaz 'These Silences Are All The Words' 2017-18 |
Equally
heartening and possibly my favourite piece from this year’s Biennial is a film
at the Open Eye Gallery titled ‘These Silences Are All The Words’ by
Madiha Aijaz. Filmed in Karachi, Pakistan, the film documents librarians
working in public libraries and their library users as they reflect on the
shift of language from Urdu to English. The libraries in this film (and
libraries in general) come to symbolise these sort-of barometers for changes in
culture, language, need and understanding in our communities and societies; the
poetic and literary history of Urdu versus the historical and political
complexity of the English language (the legacy of the Raj). Aijaz explains that
the books themselves in these libraries, written in Urdu speak of, ‘the
struggle for freedom and the formation of Muslim identity in undivided India’
and yet in some ways things have not changed, the library itself is now in conflict
with the language of the texts it holds and modernisation of the world and its users today. There is a need to preserve the past whilst making it accessible to those in the future. Though the film itself is not angry in its tone and at only approx. twelve
minutes long acts more of a documentary of the reality of these libraries and
for the viewer to come to their own conclusions. The shots of the libraries,
the light hitting the dusty books are in themselves beautiful! As shelves of
books, tomes and texts almost inherently are, surely? I am utterly bias, having
worked in a library for the best part of nine months, but am curiously
fascinated by the foreign yet-familiarity of the libraries in this film and
humbled by the reverence with which they are spoken of, “When I enter the
library, I leave my ego and shoes at the door.” It makes me speculate the
idea of sacredness in today’s society, what is sacred? Is it important? Is
religion sacred anymore, is it knowledge; perhaps a combination of both/neither?
Is sacredness subjective and does that led to decline in the value that a
shared sense of sacredness brings to uniting people. Where do public places,
such as libraries still fit in being custodians of values, freedom of speech
and community?
 |
| Francis Alys, 'Outskirts of Mosul' 2016 - part of 'Age Piece' 2018 |
One
of the best venues for art has to be the Victoria Gallery & Museum where
Francis Alӱs’ small but beautiful postcard paintings from 1980s to the present
are exhibited under the title ‘Age Piece’. They have an immediate
painterly quality but are compositionally highly cinematic, painted in plein
air in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq whilst looking for new locations for
his film projects. Apart from the John Moores Painting Prize, which is also on
during the Biennial at the Walker Gallery, there is a famine of painting
throughout the Biennial as a whole. These little works really shine as being
amongst the most honest, intimate and captivating paintings throughout. The
gallery itself is also an eclectically stunning location to house these
paintings amongst dentistry tools, plastic botanical plant models, fossils and
taxidermy all housed in a spectacularly tiled Victorian red brick building.
Other Biennial highlights here include Taus Makhacheva’s fun, mesmerizing and
death-defying film, ‘Tightrope’ which I first came across last year at the
Venice Biennial; http://spannerintheworkz.blogspot.com/2017/07/viva-venezia.html
 |
| Botanical Plant models at the Victoria Gallery & Museum |
If
viewing art in unusual spaces and contexts is for you then the Biennial almost
always delivers in showing art in a host of disused and/or period buildings
(many of them over the years have since been developed, for better or worse).
For 2018 St George’s Hall situated directly outside Liverpool Lime Street
Station is a Grade 1 listed building dated back to 1854 and is used for concert halls
and law courts; inside several films are shown within the underground spaces,
prison cells and courtroom. The context for these films by Joyce
Wieland, Inci Eviner, Aslan Gaisumov, Lamia Joreige, Brian Jungen & Dunane
Linklater and Naeem Mohaiemen creates a heightened sense of awareness that is
different to the more familiar context of the gallery and leads me to
pay more attention than I perhaps normally would. It is not everyday you see a three-screened film in a courtroom or boat sailing across a prison cell wall....! Across the Biennial there are more films being shown than there are hours in
the day, which is a bit disappointing if you are limited in time. The Playhouse
Theatre in the heart of the city centre features yet more films, Reetu Sattar’s
‘Harano Sur’ (Lost Tune) documents a performance in Bangladesh in
which people played one of seven sustained notes on the harmonium. It is worth
hearing as much (if not more) as it is worth seeing.
 |
| St George's Hall Steps from the Courtroom down to the prison cells |
Possibly the
most talked about piece from this year’s Biennial is Banu Cennetoğlu’s
list tracing the information of more than 34,000 refugees and migrants who have
lost their lives within or on the borders of Europe since 1993; displayed in
the Biennial on billboards along Great George Street. A work that has been
vandalised, restored and eventually left in its now semi-vandalised appearance (as a statement of the political unease that this work generated). The list
compiled by UNITED for Intercultural Action has been facilitated by Banu who
translated the list and placed it in public spaces such as billboards and
newspapers. It is a powerful, if depressing (made slightly even more depressing
work for being sabotaged) graphic reminder of the scale of
lives lost. Ironically for those who sought to destroy this work it has
actually gained more poignancy in the traces of marks made by the glue that
once held these posters the billboard than in the physical presence of the
names themselves. The glue marks becoming a tally of the violent act in attempting
to remove them, the resilience of human endurance and consequence that these
names, these people cannot be forgotten; that actions and history have
consequence.
 |
| Glue residue left from the 'destruction' of Banu Cennetoglu's list of Refugee names |
There
is far more to see besides what I have mentioned here and these are my own personal
highlights. I feel that out of all the apparent doom and gloom of cuts within
art education, austerity, Brexit and Trump that the Biennial has continued to
look outwards to what is happening within the arts globally, showing work at a time when it is all too easy to be pessimistic, that there is more that
unites us than divides us. Art that calls for more action, more participation
through questioning, thinking, speaking/listening, engaging, creating, building, planting
and maybe even blogging! Nothing is not an option.
Liverpool
Biennial 2018, can be seen at selected venues across the city until October 28th.
For more information visit: http://www.biennial.com/2018
No comments:
Post a Comment