Sep 13 2016

Going out but always coming home again: Liverpool Biennial 2016

by Andrew Stooke

Through Liverpool’s renovated docks, on route between Biennial venues. All photos by Andrew Stooke for ArtAsiaPacific.

Brussels-based French artist AUDREY COTTIN’s Flour Tables (2016) invites visitors to Cains Brewery to make their own sculptures out of dough.

Copies of LU PINGYUAN’s fable, The Two Sided Lake (2016),
only available for collection from Hondo, a local Chinese
supermarket in Liverpool.

LU PINGYUAN’s story of a dystopian future, which was not fully visible when this reviewer visited its site at the Epic Hotel in Liverpool’s Duke Street.

Still from an episode of FABIEN GIRAUD & RAPHAËL SIBONI’s film series “The Unmanned” (2014– ). The episode seen here, “1922 – The Uncomputable” (2016), involves the construction of a fictitious climate prediction center staffed by 64,000 blindfold women. They guess the likelihood of world weather conditions. Predictably, the weather project succumbs to its rational flaw—and is destroyed by a freak storm within the film.

Visitors watching LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN’s Rubber Coated Steel (2016) at The Oratory, which is overlooked by a monument dedicated to workhouse nurse Agnes Elizabeth Jones, which is inscribed with the phrase, “She Hath Done What She Could.” Hamdan’s video shows a target practice range, while the audio follows an enquiry into the real-life shooting of two teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamed Abu Daher. The artist, who also works as a forensic audio analyst, presented evidence at the enquiry asserting that the sound of the shots was from live ammunition and not from rubber bullets.

KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO’s affecting video installation Guests (2009), presented at FACT, brings human drama to the surface. Intimacy toward the projected image of visitors is heightened, but also made ambiguous, by the figures’ lack of definition. They are close, but always separate.

Untitled (2009–14) is the title of an extended project by the artists FABIEN GIRAUD and RAPHAËL SIBONI. With every innovation in technology, the artists make a video recording of the sunset without a lens on the device. Showing at the Open Eye Gallery, it results in a projection room that slowly gets darker.

A corner of KOKI TANAKA’s thoughtful excavation of a youth protest from 1985. The part of the video seen here shows interviews with participants from the protest, who are now adults.

Having opened in July, the Liverpool Biennial (7/9–10/16) has been marked the “post-Brexit festival.” Like the rhetoric of the exit faction, it is also seen as advocating the UK’s alliances to unspecified trading opportunities outside Europe, looking beyond to a muddled internationalism. A multifaceted spirit is being played out in the event’s six overlapping themes—“Ancient Greece,” “Chinatown,” “Children’s Episode,” “Monuments from the Future,” “Software” and “Flashback.” In other words, they are concepts that are broad enough to accommodate any idea or thought. This might sound like a willful structure, but given the nature of the large-scale cultural event, the long treks across town to its various venues has led the art-viewing experience to mingle with the historic elements of Liverpool.

The display of 44 art projects at 22 different sites has allowed the city to throw open some new and magical venues, such as a derelict art deco cinema only a stone’s throw from the city’s main railway station, a battered and abandoned former brewery, and a neoclassical oratory; but none could be described as the primary exhibition space. Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s musical film, Dogsy Ma Bone (2016), performed by students from local schools at Cains Brewery, encompasses at least three Biennial themes—a children’s episode, a flashback, and a future monument—with its final scene even taking place on the steps of a neoclassical bank. Brechtian in vision, Dogsy Ma Bone exposes the mechanisms of production and sociopolitical themes of capitalist greed, with a delivery by nonprofessional actors. In fact, Chetwynd brings out pure performances from the cast that balance real-life grit with innocent folly.

While travelling between venues has gotten visitors into the city streets, the gesture is charmingly inverted by American artist Jason Dodge’s What the Living Do (2016). At many sites, including Tate Liverpool, Dodge collects small offerings of trash left behind by revelers, such as empty bottles or paper and leaves gathered into a corner by air currents, and with the utmost nonchalance deposits them at the gallery. The garbage is deliberately annoying, testing both the audience and venue on what they can welcome as art. The Tate also presents a show mixing antiquities from the local Ince Blundell Collection with diverse contemporary works, but the subtlety of the classical fragments is disturbed by the bravura of the new, resulting in a feeling of languid competition that makes both old and modern seem weak and uncertain.

A mini retrospective of Polish born Krzysztof Wodiczko at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) explores the theme of displacement in the form of temporary shelters. In the work of Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian—who are frequent collaborators based in Dubai—displacement is approached through phantasmagoric exploration. Creating “extreme” assemblages and videos of fervent performances, their works explore a scenario concerning the experiential antics of a trio of alien characters, something like “Third Rock From the Sun” meets Paul McCarthy. Their works appear in multiple settings along with that of Indian sculptor Sahej Rahal, whose awkward and provisional structures, some scattered across desks, look like temporary occurrences in public places, and feel as if they have come from another galaxy. Lara Favaretto’s Momentary Monument—The Stone (2016) is another alien presence, poised in a street set for redevelopment. It is a huge, seemingly unassailable block of granite, but the denouement is that it, along with the street, will be demolished at the end of the Biennial.

International biennials tend to seize on heritage, putting interesting, and hopefully great, art into elegiac locations. Liverpool, as such, has a rich intangible cultural heritage, which makes it a city that is more than its buildings, harbor, trade and cultural renovation.

Below are some other highlights from Liverpool Biennial 2016.

RAMIN HAERIZADEH, ROKNI HAERIZADEH and HESAM RAHMANIAN’s Logbook (2016), a pram and an accompanying video installed at Open Eye Gallery. All photos by Andrew Stooke for ArtAsiaPacific.

BETTY WOODMAN’s decorative Liverpool Fountain (2016) couldn’t compete with the powerful architectural context that surrounded it.

Greek artist ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS’ Vessel (2016), installed at Tate Liverpool, which tells a tale about a highly critical man who lived in a vase.

India Buildings is the venue for works from the Biennial’s Associate Artists program, which supports ten artists from the North of England with the
development of their international profile.

SAHEJ RAHAL’s sculpture Undergod (2016), made of cracking
red mud covering a found collection of industrial items,
such as a radiator and a projector, looking somewhat out of place
behind the Liverpool town hall.

A manifestation of JASON DODGE’s What the Living Do (2016), comprising debris displaced from the street. The work has brought a slight sense of unease to Tate Liverpool.

Taiwanese artist YIN-JU CHEN’s multi-part installation, Extrastellar Evaluations (2016) speculates on the culture of another civilization living alongside humans. The aliens’ values and their perturbations mollify the fetishization of Earth’s sociopolitical currents.

Detail of YIN-JU CHEN’S Extrastellar Evaluations (2016) at Cains Brewery.

Still from Dogsy Ma Bone (2016), MARVIN GAYE CHETWYND’s joyous musical film that employed the talents and attitude of local children and young people.

Handmade costumes for MARVIN GAYE CHETWYND’s Dogsy Ma Bone (2016) were displayed nearby the film at Cains Brewery.

Liverpool Biennial 2016 is currently on view in Liverpool, UK, until October 16, 2016.

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Sep 2016