Returning to the city she once called home, Lisette May Monroe reflects on the 2025 Liverpool Biennial, BEDROCK, tracing it through her memories of past exhibitions and considering how the city-wide festival continues to evolve.
Liverpool Biennial began in 1998 and I think (though the memory is hazy) that I attended my first in 2004 – the time the Walker Gallery had a Stuckist retrospective, and Yoko Ono put multiple pictures of breasts and vaginas out in the city centre, and the Chapman Brothers (yes, really) were judging the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. It was, indeed, a very different time.
I moved to the city in 2010. I still remember standing outside Moorfields station, mouth open, looking up at Richard Wilson’s Turning The Place Over, which was commissioned for the 2007 Biennial as part of the Capital of Culture programme. The work was an eight-metre-wide hole cut out of the upper floor of a derelict Yates Wine Lodge, the perfect circle rotated out of the building at an angle. I still think about this work most weeks. Now decommissioned, you can watch a video of it in action online, as I regularly do.
For me, Liverpool Biennial came to be synonymous with scale: Sir Peter Blake’s Everybody Razzle Dazzle (2015), a vibrant, camouflaged, public-use Mersey ferry; Elmgreen & Dragset’s But I’m on the Guest List Too! (2012), a bouncer-guarded door in Liverpool One; Ugo Rondinone’s Liverpool Mountain (2018), a ten-metre stack of fluorescent rocks down at the water; and the incredible 2up2down/Homebaked (2012) by Jeanne van Heeswijk and the communities of Anfield and Breckfield. This two-and-a-half-year project redesigned an affordable housing scheme with local residents and continues to run as a social enterprise bakery, which, incidentally, makes some of the best pies in town. All of these projects and the others that surrounded it were not only large in scale, but also in reach and intention. They were public with a capital ‘P’. I remember being overwhelmed by how lateral the city felt then, and it still does. This is one area in which I feel that the Biennial has prevailed: a sense of it genuinely being for everyone.
In 2025, Marie-Anne McQuay’s BEDROCK Biennial reflects this. The vast public projects have diminished, but so have the public budgets that would previously have backed them. This Biennial rests on the idea of ‘bedrock’ in its multiplicity; the sandstone that supports and carves out the city’s architecture, as well as the histories, both political and social, that now make up the city as it exists today.
The work shown is thoughtful, concise and well-matched to the city’s complex history. The Kara Chin ceramic works embedded into the pavement on Hardman Street are the best example of this, and speak to the elements of the city that I feel I know so well. Gritty, abstract and glamorous in a very specific way, it is a work which tells a good story and has now become absorbed into the Scouse everyday.
Further down Hardman Street, in the Black-E, Elizabeth Price offers a meditation on the architecture of Catholic Modernist Churches and how the spaces we build to worship not only become a testament to faith, but also to the journeys that bring the need for these spaces into being. The film holds all of this with the confident conviction anticipated in any new Elizabeth Price film – the speech bubbles, the slick pop sounds, the choral music guide us through with ease.
Next door, in the shadow of Nelson Street’s Chinese Arch (the largest outside China; a gift from Liverpool’s twinned city, Shanghai), is Pine Court Housing Association. Established in 1986, its mission is to positively promote ‘cultural tolerance and cohesion across their diverse communities’ and, for the duration of the Biennial, it is also the host of Karen Tam 譚嘉文’s Scent of Thunderbolts. The work takes conversations with community members as its starting point, and pulls in stories, archive materials, props, and theatre sets to build memories of Cantonese opera. Fabric bamboo stalks hang from the ceiling as hand-painted backdrops cover the walls. Benches are set as if waiting for a performance, though they also feel ready to be reconfigured as a place to meet and gossip with friends within the familiar cocoon of the theatre, a space where stories endure.
Since attending my first biennial in 2004 and becoming part of the travelling crowd of curators and artists that move from one to the next, I’ve come to realise that I honestly no longer know what I want from a biennial. How does this format represent the vast communities and ideas that live within the host city? This is an issue that it feels like Marie-Anne McQuay and the Biennial team have actually got to grips with. Is it Razzle Dazzle? No, but what are we expecting in the post-financial crash era of government cuts and austerity? This Biennial is made from a place of understanding – not just in the academic sense, but in the lived-in sense. Sometimes, when works slip into places so well they become overlooked, it’s as though they have always been there. It takes a certain insight to do that. ChihChung Chang 張致中’s Keystone, which is pasted up at the gable end of the China City restaurant, does so perfectly; the work, which speaks and draws a connection to his works in the Bluecoat, feels like it has always been there, albeit a little off, drawing a subtle agitation.
Battersby.
There will always be something I miss from the monumentalist ‘spinning building’ era, though I’m also aware I am conditioned to the celebrity-style works that a biennial brings. Liverpool has always been unapologetic in its energy, in its vibrancy, and in its solidarity – the bells and whistles works of old matched that ‘bigness’. But this Biennial instead calls for you to look closely, to really understand the city. The work presented opens up those cracks in Liverpool’s history and uses international and local voices to make clear what needs to be exposed and re-examined: the city’s history and its fundamental position in facilitating the colonial project and transatlantic slave trade. This Biennial is quiet, not because it isn’t saying anything – far from it – but since it acknowledges that it is joining a conversation in the city rather than defining it. It allows space for other voices in the city to continue speaking, long into the future.
Battersby.
Written by Lisette May Monroe
