Liverpool Biennial 2023

10 Jun-17 Sep 2023

Overview

Join us for Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest contemporary visual arts festival which takes place across Liverpool’s public spaces, galleries and museums. Visitors to the city can enjoy a dynamic programme of free exhibitions, performances, screenings, community and learning activities and fringe events over a 14 week period that shine a light on our city’s vibrant cultural scene.

The 12th edition of the Biennial is titled uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things and addresses the history and temperament of the city of Liverpool and is a call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing. In the isiZulu language, uMoya means spirit, breath, air, climate and wind.

The artists on display at Tate Liverpool explore the space between life and death and how to work through ancestral pain towards healing. Highlights include Isabel do Rosário’s largescale textile pieces, exhibited for the first time outside of Brazil, the first showing of Edgar Calel’s Ru k’ ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge) 2021 and Torkwase Dyson’s monumental Liquid A Place 2021 which directly converses with the brutal histories of the water and docks which surround the gallery.

The display also includes work by Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales, Francis Offman, Gala Porras-Kim, Guadalupe Maravilla, Lubaina Himid, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, and Shannon Alonzo.