Liverpool Biennial has announced the programme for the 2014 edition. Curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman, the 8th Liverpool Biennial exhibition is titled A Needle Walks into a Haystack and takes place across seven Liverpool venues including the historic Trade Union Centre on Hardman Street. This year’s biennial is the second under director Sally Tallant, who replaced Lewis Biggs in 2011.
Launching the festival, Symphony No 11: Hillsborough Memorial, a specially composed new work by Michael Nyman, will be performed by the Liverpool Philharmonic orchestra in a concert at Liverpool Cathedral. Commemorating the football tragedy 25 years on, Liverpool-born mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge will sing the names of the 96 Liverpool fans who lost their lives.
In a separate work for the Biennial, Nyman will create a new two-screen video installation. Aztecs in Liverpool refers to the Codex Fejervary-Mayer, said to be one of the finest Aztec codices and held in the World Museum in Liverpool. The still and moving images from the film have been collected by Nyman over a 20-year period in Mexico, his newly adopted home.
Companion of curated projects
Elsewhere during the Biennial, which this year opens in July and runs until late October, FACT will hold the first UK solo-exhibition by the American artist and filmmaker Sharon Lockhart. At The Bluecoat, Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room will be recreated as part of an exhibition devoted to the artist’s work.
Exploring the relationship between television and art, an apartment in Liverpool will welcome audiences for a series of screenings, conversations and events around the work of Jef Cornelis, an experimental Belgian TV director. Also hosting a solo exhibition – but one that interacts with the works of other artists – the radical French architect Claude Parent will transform Tate Liverpool’s Wolfson Gallery through a series of slanted floors and ramps.
The main Biennial group show, taking place in the neo-classical former Trade Union Centre / School for the Blind, will feature work by 17 international artists including Israel’s Uri Aran, Marc Bauer (Switzerland), Rana Hamadeh (Lebanon), Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet (France), Judith Hopf (Germany) and UK artists Bonnie Camplin and Chris Evans.
On the weekend of 19-21 September, The Companion, a performance programme conceived by artist and writer Angie Keefer, will take place in locations throughout the city, drawing on the form of the ancient symposium: dinner, conversation, music. It will include performances and improvised contributions by artists and thinkers including Jeremiah Day, Jan Verwoert and Will Holder.
Parallel partnerships
In parallel to the main biennial exhibition will be a series of co-commissions and partnership exhibitions including Carlos Cruz-Diez’ first world war centenary commemoration work, the 65th Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition, new shows at Open Eye Gallery and Liverpool John Moores University, and the John Moores Painting Prize at Walker Art Gallery.
In particular, the Exhibition Research Centre at Liverpool John Moores University will showcase the work of Adrian Henri (1932-2000) who pioneered happenings in Britain, holding the first one in 1962. A student of Richard Hamilton and Victor Passmore, Henri was an artist, writer, poet and curator who played a pivotal role in the emergence of Liverpool’s internationally-important counter-cultural scene. The exhibition brings together original paintings, collages, ephemera, scripts, counter-cultural documents and correspondence.
Since it was founded in 1999, the Liverpool Biennial has shown the work of over 350 artists from 72 countries. Its 10-week run in 2012 attracted over half a million visitors.
Liverpool Biennial 2014 runs from 5 July – 26 October 2014 at numerous venues and locations accross the city. biennial.com
More on a-n.co.uk:
Liverpool Biennial announces 2014 curators
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