My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts

“What would Liverpool be without it?” On the eve of Liverpool Biennial 2025, C James Fagan ponders his sometimes complex, on-going relationship with the UK’s largest festival of contemporary art…

It’s a Biennial year, folks! What does that mean, other than that for three months, Liverpool hosts the largest contemporary arts festival in the UK? Looking at what’s in store in this 2025 edition, themed BEDROCK, I find myself thinking about previous editions. In doing so, I realised that the Biennial – the first of which was in 1998 – coincided with my growing interest in and deeper engagement with contemporary art.

I have experienced the Biennial as a visitor, volunteer, and as a writer, having written reviews of previous editions, and having been commissioned by the Biennial. My writings on the subject have appeared on this very website. I’ve navigated several editions by now, so have seen its victories and its failures, and a lot of art.

I have to admit, this isn’t a critical piece; it’s more in the style of a rambling memoir. Apologies if there’s an ‘old man yelling at clouds’ vibe, that’s not my intent. It’s just, looking back, things get conflated, the details lose their definition. That also means that I jump around a bit. What I thought were pieces from different Biennials came from the same edition for instance. But each Biennial has a different effect on you. Unsurprising given the number of artists involved.

One of the first artists that sprang to mind was N.I.C.J.O.B. (from 2002), who created a series of videos featuring video clips edited to create music from the sound effects used in the original source film. A jingle if you will, because N.I.C.J.O.B.’s videos were in every Biennial venue, providing a crashing, banging welcome into each space. Perhaps its mix of repetition and ubiquity meant it sticks in the mind.

Was that the same year of a show in an abandoned church, or chapel? Was it the Biennial where one venue had a van hanging out of it? Which makes me think of Do-Ho Suh‘s house dropped between two buildings in 2010, somewhere on London Road; and the big red house that played ABBA on the riverfront. That was probably 2006 as I recall making a trip from university in Wales (where I was studying at the time) to see it.

One of the key elements of the Biennial is how it gets you to rediscover the city. Making you visit places you ordinarily wouldn’t. Finding lost spaces, or spaces about to be lost, given a stay of execution. Like the year it took over the soon to be demolished Post Office sorting office behind Lime Street station. My main recollection was that it was exhausting walking around those cavernous spaces; then seeing a huge black inflated pillow-shaped installation, and realising putting a big thing in a big space means a loss of a sense of scale.

Some of the abiding memories aren’t just of the artworks, then, it’s the spaces they occupy. Like the sorting office, for instance. Seeing the remains of strange equipment and of its former workforce – graffiti, work rotas, sheets of stamps left on the walls. Or, more recently, in that basement space where the glass panel on the door reads ‘Kommadant’ (the leavings of a film set – the city mediated by yet another narrative).

In 2010, it was the then recently vacated Rapid Hardware store. Walking past empty showrooms, past empty window displays, I recall finding a set of aeroplane seats in front of the hyperactive video work of Ryan Trecartin, echoing in the largely empty spaces. While one of the strengths of the Biennial is its use of such non-art spaces, the ratio between art and space can fall in the favour of the latter.

The willingness to trek between artworks and venues, though, is part and parcel of the Biennial. It is a city-wide event – walking the city is the way one engages with the Biennial, and vice versa. I remember trekking to a hotel on the edge of the city centre only to find the installation I was looking for never took place. Then there was the year I walked for about a mile along the river looking for a ‘light installation’ only to discover it was simply a huge question mark on the outside of the boat shed. The one I had been looking at for about twenty minutes!

Is this what the Biennial does: put contemporary art right in view? Like, when Yoko Ono, maybe one of the most well-known artists outside the – let’s remember quite narrow niche of the – artworld, showed her work, My Mommy Is Beautiful, across the city. Both artwork and promotion for the Biennial, it featured a breast and pubis on banners throughout the city. Does this work somehow reflect an element of the Biennial, that it’s at once highly visible and yet isn’t widely known, outside the usual places?

So much of the Biennial exists in the public realm. You have Ugo Rondinone’s Liverpool Mountain on the Royal Albert Dock. The brightly coloured rocks have become a favourite spot for a photo, but does it help raise the profile of the Biennial? Do people make a connection between the sculpture and the city’s art festival? Does it even matter if they do?

Is it engagement by stealth? Putting people in conversation with contemporary art without them realising it? Throughout the city there is evidence of the Biennial, and Biennials past. They’ve only recently taken down the Betty Woodman fountain; the binoculars which let you spy on the town hall are still there. Can you still see the circle cut into the side of a building that was a much-celebrated Richard Wilson piece?

Is this how the Biennial relates to the city? It’s long been a criticism of the Biennial that it doesn’t really relate to the city at all; perhaps it’s time, instead, to think about how it has become part of the city’s fabric in small and unexpected ways. Through this ramble across Biennials past, I’ve begun to consider my relationship with it.

While it’s hardly immune to criticism, then, what would Liverpool be without it? Certainly a little less exciting. Where else do you get an art festival on this scale with the time in which to see it? Where else can you be exposed to this many artists and not have to go to London – or further afield? Ok: given the amount of artists, it is always going to be a mixed bag. But the likelihood of seeing something you’ll remember (however vaguely), perhaps even love, is high.

Take Torkwase Dyson’s haunting and beautiful installation Liquid A Place, which formed part of Tate Liverpool’s 2023 Biennial display. How else, where else, would I have encountered such an artist and their work?

As the 2025 Biennial approaches, I look forward to seeing it. What – who – will I discover? What will make a mark on the city? What ghosts will be left behind?

C James Fagan

Liverpool Biennial 2025 runs 7 June–14 September

Read our Liverpool Biennial 2025 preview

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Images, from top: Turning the Place Over, Richard Wilson, 2007, courtesy Liverpool Biennial. Alexandra Wolkowicz; Copperas Hill; Liverpool Mountain, Ugo Rondinone, 2018; Liquid a Place, Torkwase Dyson, 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty