Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – Reviewed
Tracking a philosophical line across the city, Mike Pinnington reports on drifting purposefully through the 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial…
Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK, proposes, says director Sam Lackey, to explore and expose the city’s foundations, by connecting international artists with its histories, people and the very ground we walk on. That latter element is particularly apt this time for those after the best BEDROCK experience.
While every Biennial (any city-wide festival for that matter) encourages and very often rewards drifting purposefully, this 13th edition has it at its very core. Not least because an artist you come across at one venue or site, may, you note, also have work elsewhere. Plotting out a course in anticipation, with your subsequent meaningful meandering, you track a literal and philosophical line, becoming better aware of otherwise overlooked stuff of the city along the way.
My own odyssey started at RIBA North, still the temporary home to Tate Liverpool. It is, it must be said, an underwhelming beginning. It is somehow flat; there is little energy, or synergy between the works brought together here. Try as they might, Sheila Hicks’ Grand Boules, which (like much of this display) seem somehow incidental, out of place, can’t tie the space together. Fred Wilson’s Flag (2009) – ironically monochrome – cuts through. Its African and Caribbean flags, drained of colour, represent loss, and the lives devastated by the Transatlantic Slave Trade; but they also suggest hope, renewal, opportunity. These largely blank canvases await African stories still to be told, free of the yoke of Colonialism.
I head next to the Bluecoat, where things improve dramatically, with Liverpool born Nigerian-German Amber Akaunu’s specially commissioned film, Dear Othermother (top). A moving, gently profound documentary-style exploration and celebration of the friendships forged – in-part out of necessity – by single mothers (and their children) in Toxteth, it speaks subtly to circumstance, class and geography. It also highlights, inadvertently or otherwise, the rarity with which we get to hear Scouse accents platformed in this sector, not least in Liverpool.
Further down the gallery’s corridor you’ll find Odur Ronald’s aluminium passports hanging poignantly above vacant chairs (Muly’ Ato Limu – All in One Boat, 2025). Addressing questions of borders, who might reasonably expect to pass through them – and who might not – it conjures the people and lives of those suggested only by their absence, and the cruelly just out of reach passports.
Still at the Bluecoat, Alice Rekab’s ongoing Bunchlann, Buncharraig (which translates from Irish Gaelic as Origin Family/Bedrock) is a complex, multi-layered representation of the mixed-race Irish artist’s identity. It is also a kind of personal Wunderkammer, full of artefacts, allusions and clues. There is the book-case with a copy of Cogadh na Reann (H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds); a pair of gargoyles as narcissi lost in their returned gaze in household mirrors; the beautiful collaged Family Lines – Samir My Father, in the Old Studio. It is an intimate, personal work laying bare the complicated composite picture of self, one I plan to return to to better explore.
Onwards to the Walker, which has as many artists on display as anywhere, making it a good, quick hit for those wanting to drill straight into BEDROCK. Karen Tam’s incredibly beautiful and ornate marble-effect Dreamstone quartet of cast resin works resemble sublime, elemental scenes, conjuring illusory worlds and old techniques. Tam is also resident at China Town’s Pine Court, where the artist and curator’s installation, Scent of Thunderbolts (2024), takes inspiration from Cantonese opera. Addressing and serving a Chinese community historically so overlooked, it provides a setting for sonic memory.
Speaking of journeys through sound, duo Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic incorporate – to great effect – a throbbing soundtrack (Toxteth Dub Sonic Soundscape Vol. 07) to their Afro-futuristic monument, Concrete Roots / Griots Epic Stories from the Black Atlantic (2025). Constructed in-part with sheets of dyed indigo – a commodity of great value during the Slave Trade – their work looks back to Liverpool’s murky past while proposing a contemporary black culture incorporating elements from African, American, British, and Caribbean peoples. A highly effective combination of the aural, physical, and fragmented texts (that read like cut-ups referring to key moments and flashpoints of Liverpool’s recent histories), it demands attention.
By contrast, Cevdet Erek’s Away Terrace: Anfield, Goodison, II, Split, might almost go unnoticed. Notable initially for what is absent, these unobtrusive constructions – as the titles suggest – depict versions of the city’s storied football clubs’ stadia. Wall-mounted and resembling, more or less, artwork frames, they perhaps suggest that what happens on a football pitch could, at least occasionally, be considered to be within the realms of art. But Erek is just as concerned with the onlookers at the match – those with home advantage as well as the siege mentality forced upon or adopted by the away support (indicated here in smaller gold leaf sections).
Liverpool, for so long synonymous with football and the wider culture that surrounds it, can rarely have hosted an artist treating the subject matter with as much respect and consideration as Erek does. This is confirmed by another work, Away Terrace (Us and Them), at 20 Jordan Street in the Baltic Triangle. The artist’s large-scale installation is soundtracked by intoxicating rhythms representing ‘home’ and ‘away’ fans – the us and them of the title. It’s a great example of art as transportation, whisking viewers away to matchday scenes of getting lost amid chanting masses and 90 minutes of fierce partisan support. And, with the city having just witnessed a season of seismic events – Liverpool’s 20th title win, and Everton men’s final game played at their historic Goodison home – Erek’s works (all made this year) feel pretty zeitgeisty.
A stone’s throw away, you’ll bump once more into Odur Ronald at, of all places, SEVENSTORE, a kind of high end high street fashion retailer. Of all of the Biennial’s non-art spaces, it is perhaps among the least typical. And, yet, it is the perfect host to the artist’s No Hurry (2020), a memory of a sneaker-loving friend running late, it is in the form of a shining pair of Converse made in Ronald’s trademark scrap metal. So convincing are they, I confess that I looked for a good while at the rows of trainers as if I was carefully considering which pair to try on and buy before I spotted Ronald’s All Stars!
Being in such close proximity to Erek’s stadium, the shoes put me in mind of the association Liverpool has with fashion – especially trainers. This association is thought by many to have originated with Liverpool Football Club’s early trips abroad to face European opposition in the 1960s, when they would be followed by their fans, who brought back with them loads of new sportswear. Between them, Erek and Ronald represent key narrative threads of the city’s cultural touchstones – and of this Biennial: international artists with perspectives and perceptions formed elsewhere, that nevertheless resonate with and contribute to what is, temporarily, the home of their artwork.
Such subtle, sometimes indirect connections abound; for the casual observer, there are few statement, or headline works to hang onto in BEDROCK’s make-up – very little of the spectacle or ‘name’ artists one might associate with Biennials past. One such higher profile inclusion, Turner-Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price’s HERE WE ARE (2025), fails to convince. A large-scale speculative yet didactic presentation on why Catholic Churches – so crucial to those flocking to the region from Ireland and further afield – might share DNA with modernist architecture, I can’t help but think it would have made a more successful visual essay than it does an artwork. Certainly, somehow, there seems an opportunity missed here in getting to grips with the story of the heritage and make-up of Liverpool through those arriving, contributing and staying here.
This Biennial, then, is at its best in the quieter moments. It also requires of the visitor attentiveness, so that we discover rather than ignore or blindly step over works like Mapping the Wasteland (trail), the paving tiles of Kara Chin that animate Berry Street. What Chin calls ‘litter fossils’ come in the form of discarded coffee cups, raiding seagulls and more. Setting us on a journey between venues, they signal that this is a biennial of art as punctuation rather than bombast.
Once this dawns on you, it is all the richer for it. Its curator, Marie-Anne McQuay (who has a longstanding association with the city she calls home), understands the grammar of Liverpool, and has sought, through BEDROCK, to foreground the many narratives that intersect here. With artists both home and abroad telling the sometimes knotty, intertwined stories of the city, its success – or otherwise – relies upon us bringing a similarly close reading to Liverpool.
Mike Pinnington
Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK continues at various venues across the city until 14 September
Images, from top: Amber Akaunu, Still from ‘Dear Othermother’, 2024. Courtesy of the Artist; Odur Ronald, ‘Muly’Ato Limu – All in One Boat’ 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Bluecoat. Photography by Mark McNulty; Karen Tam譚嘉文‘Dreamstone I, II, III & IV’, 2024. Liverpool Biennial 2025 atWalker Art Gallery. Photography by Stuart Whipps; Cevdet Erek, Away Terrace (Anfield) 2025, Away Terrace (Goodison) 2025, Away Terrace II 2025, Away Terrace (split) 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Walker Art Gallery. Photography by Mark McNulty; Kara Chin, ‘Mapping the Wasteland – Can and Bottle’, Liverpool Biennial 2025 on Berry Street. Photography by Rob Battersby
