Liverpool Biennial 2016: first look report

A first look at Liverpool Biennial, opening this weekend, finds our writer taking in new work from Mark Leckey and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

Feature by Sacha Waldron | 08 Jul 2016

Unless you have been living under a rock, or in Tracey Emin’s case are married to a rock and have been otherwise engaged, you will not have failed to notice that Liverpool Biennial 2016 launches today across all the major galleries and spaces in the city.

And I hope you have your wits about you, because it’s all a little complex. Split into six episodes – Ancient Greece, Chinatown, Children’s Episode, Monuments from the Future, Flashback and Software – things can get a bit confusing, with the simultaneously over-complicated and over-simplified curatorial narratives often overriding individual exhibitions and works.

This is not to say that there isn’t some great stuff to see. There definitely is. Clear highlights of this year’s festival are found in the Baltic Triangle: the exhibition in Cains Brewery (a welcome new addition to the Biennial portfolio) and, in particular, Mark Leckey’s video installation at Blade Factory.

Leckey was originally supposed to be exhibiting his new work, Dream English Kid, at the Saw Mill in Wolstenholme Square. This used to be the entrance to night club Nation (which for 14 years hosted Cream), but the location burned down just a week before the festival began.

Relocated to Blade Factory (part of the old A Foundation), the work takes found YouTube footage of a Joy Division gig that Leckey attended at Eric’s club in 1979 as its starting point, and takes the audience on an AV romp through rediscovered youthful memory, the experience of coming of age, and that experience through the lens of the Northwest in the late 70s/early 80s. It’s all Cinzano fizz and club mixes of Luther Vandross, and it’s so moreish that the work is never too much (never too much, never too much). Leckey at his collaging video best.


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Over in Cains Brewery things become a bit more convoluted. The imposing space is host to a plethora of artists but at the centre, Andreas Angelidakis has designed a structure based, it seems, both on the Hadron Collider and on the shape of a discarded beer bottle lid. Divided into the Biennial ‘episodes’, it is in reality just a circular exhibition space which takes you from the main works by artists such as Celine Condorelli and the trio Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian (who are also showing at Open Eye) into Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s installation, or stage set, Dogsy Ma Bone.

Chetwynd has worked with children and teenagers through a series of workshops and performances to create a film based on and inspired by Betty Boop’s A Song A Day (1936) and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928). The slippy reality that Chetwynd is known to create, both shoddy and nuttier than a bag of squirrels, is oddly compelling.

She sucks you into a world of offbeat dada in an environment of costumes and plinths, seating decorated with too-cute dogs and scenes from Where’s Wally? The work is so strong, or so dominant, that unfortunately the rest of the work in the outside circular structure gets lost; you could really be looking at any objects, junk or art or other. It doesn’t seem to matter.

Looping back into the centre of town, Open Eye’s offering this year is a little disappointing. The downstairs gallery is devoted to Koki Tanaka’s restaging of the 1985 march of 10,000 young people, who took to the streets in protest at the Conservative government’s youth training initiative. The archival images and the background story, especially when viewed in terms of the current educational turmoil, are interesting enough and seem apt, but the re-staging footage feels tokenistic.


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Upstairs, work from the aforementioned trio Haerizadeh, Haerizadeh and Rahmanian explores artworks (such as a Mona Hatoum photograph) that have been apparently smuggled in submersibles from Dubai to Liverpool. Accompanying videos explore the fictive identities of these submersibles; a woman hides a pizza box under her dress, for example, in scenes that seem to lampoon a sort of Charlie Brooker sketch. The actual message of this project gets lost in exhibition. The videos are diverting, and the story a good one, but the underlying point is lost somewhere in the interpretation.

There are, of course, many more commissions and exhibitions to put on your agenda. The Liverpool Biennial Associate Artists space has some good work but, curated by CACTUS gallery, just feels like the Liverpool gallery (which is based in the Royal Standard) transferred to a city centre location. It would have been good to see more scope and ambition rather than transference of space.

Tate Liverpool, it seems, is a good place to start for this year’s festival. The organisers/curators see it as a portal to how contemporary artists deal with and relate to historical works (the Ancient Greece chapter, as they frame it). It does form a base for the Biennial and its ideology, although my recommendation would be to go rogue: ditch the guide and be swayed by the artists’ work itself. You might have a bit more fun.