New venues and full programme announced for Liverpool Biennial 2025
The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial will take place from June 7 until September 14
Liverpool Biennial has announced the full programme for the 2025 free festival of art, which is set to transform the city of Liverpool once again this summer. This year will be the 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial, with the theme of 'BEDROCK' running through all of the artworks.
The central theme of this year's Biennial focuses draws on Liverpool’s distinctive geography and the beliefs which underpin the city. It also acts as a metaphor for the unique social foundations of Liverpool.
Taking over historic buildings, unexpected spaces and art galleries, Liverpool Biennial – the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary visual art – has been transforming the city through art for over two decades. A dynamic programme of free exhibitions, performances, community and learning activities, and fringe events unfolds over 14 weeks, shining a light on the city’s vibrant cultural scene.
New venues and sites announced this week include 20 Jordan Street located in the city’s Baltic Triangle, Pine Court, the heritage site of Pine Court Housing Association in the heart of Chinatown, and The Black-E, Liverpool’s pioneering arts and community centre, which join venues such as Bluecoat, FACT Liverpool, Liverpool Cathedral, Liverpool Central Library, Open Eye Gallery, Tate Liverpool + RIBA North and Walker Art Gallery.
A series of outdoor works are set to be installed at sites across the city including Liverpool ONE, Mann Island, St John’s Gardens and the grounds of The Oratory at Liverpool Cathedral.
Marie-Anne McQuay, Curator, Liverpool Biennial 2025, said: “‘BEDROCK’ as a title and holding space for the festival extends from the physical sandstone foundations of the city to become a metaphor for its distinctive civic values, that are haunted by its colonial past. While responding to these contexts, I asked the invited artists to present their own ‘bedrock’; to share the values, people and places that ground them, which here includes family and chosen family, ancestral cultural heritage carried across generations, and nature that nurtures and restores them. ‘BEDROCK’ is the place we start from together.”
Here is the full Liverpool Biennial 2025 Programme
Outdoor Works
Celebrating Liverpool’s iconic architecture and public spaces, a series of newly commissioned outdoor artworks will be installed at sites across the city centre.
Alice Rekab presents a multi-city billboard project in Liverpool and Edinburgh, in partnership with EAF25 (Edinburgh Art Festival). In Liverpool, the work is co-created with students from The City of Liverpool College through a series of workshops. Displayed throughout Liverpool ONE, these collaborative works explore experiences of race, migration and belonging. Meanwhile at Bluecoat, the artist presents a multi-layered gallery installation titled ‘Bunchlann/Buncharriag’ (Irish Gaelic for ‘Origin Family’ or ‘Bedrock’).
Anna Gonzalez-Noguchi presents a modular sculpture at Mann Island, inspired by the historical import of ‘foreign’ plants into Liverpool. The three towers, constructed out of metal and reflective materials, incorporate seating, spinning elements and tubular structures engraved with records of the city’s botanical collections.
Isabel Nolan presents a steel and concrete sculpture in St John’s Gardens, supported by Art Fund. The design is inspired by a drawing of a stained-glass window held in the St Nicholas Pro-Cathedral archive and the leadwork in the windows of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral’s Lutyens Crypt. Painting and textiles by the artist are also shown at the Walker Art Gallery.
A selection from Petros Moris’ ‘ALONE’ series of mosaic sculptures referencing an abandoned playground and his parent’s own mosaic studio, will be exhibited in the grounds of The Oratory at Liverpool Cathedral, as well as at Bluecoat and Walker Art Gallery.
Further works will be exhibited across the city on streets, shop fronts, hoardings and other unexpected places:
Anna Gonzalez-Noguchi – Eurochemist, Berry Street
ChihChung Chang 張致中 – Chinatown
Kara Chin – Berry Street
Odur Ronald – SEVENSTORE, Jamaica Street
Venues
Bluecoat
The artists at Bluecoat bring insights into the family, chosen family and cultural heritage that they carry with them, and which grounds them.
Amy Claire Mills presents an interactive, sensory installation, co-commissioned with Liverpool-based disability and Deaf arts organisation DaDa, supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation. The artist advocates for creating inclusive, adaptive ‘third spaces’ that prioritise disability representation, access and care. The artist will also create a collaborative performance with d/Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent practitioners from the region.
Alongside work by Alice Rekab which focuses on intergenerational experiences of Irish, Black and multi-heritage family life, and Petros Moris’ extracted ‘ready-made’ mosaics, other highlights include a new film titled ‘Dear Othermother’ by Amber Akaunu which celebrates a deeply personal tale of friendship, single motherhood and alternative, matriarchal community networks in Toxteth, one of the oldest Black communities in the UK.
On the ground floor, Odur Ronald presents his most ambitious installation to date, involving a vast collection of hand-stitched aluminium passports, to address the conditions of forced and voluntary migration of African people to Europe throughout history.
Upstairs, ChihChung Chang 張致中 restages his ‘Port of Fata Morgana’ installation. The work, centred around a model ship created by the artist’s father, explores family histories, alongside the history of naval architecture and the parallels between Liverpool and the port city of Kaohsiung. Work by the artist is also on view at Pine Court.
FACT Liverpool
The artists at FACT Liverpool explore both healing and extractive relationships with the environment, connecting their research to the urban and natural environments of the city and localised and global histories of colonial trade.
In FACT’s foyer gallery, Kara Chin presents an interactive, multimedia installation which draws on repeated motifs such as seagulls, parking meters and the seemingly invasive Buddleia plant often found in cities. Co-commissioned by FACT Liverpool and inspired by aesthetics from Manga and apocalyptic video game graphics, Chin explores themes of rage, grief and nuisance. The project extends to the streets of Liverpool with intricate ceramic tiles appearing on routes between venues.
In Gallery 1, DARCH produces an earth, ceramic and sound installation in collaboration with residents in Sefton, who have contributed stories about their connection to the land and bedrock – physical and spiritual – of Merseyside. Co-commissioned with At The Library, elements of the project will also be available digitally on biennial.com and in-person at Bootle Library.
Also in Gallery 1, Linda Lamignan questions the different ways in which humans treat and value the natural world, whether for profit or as something to be respected and protected. A new film work references the artist’s own ancestry and traditions, the knowledge systems of animism and geology, and the long history of palm oil and petroleum extraction in Nigeria’s Delta State area, including how those materials were traded with Liverpool.
Liverpool Cathedral
Liverpool Cathedral – a monumental sandstone building set in a quarry which reveals the bedrock of the city – hosts two artists who explore the venue as a place of sanctuary, and one in which women’s contributions to the city are celebrated.
Ana Navas presents a series of ‘glass collages’ in the Lady Chapel, which draw inspiration from the colours and forms found in the clothing and objects within portraits of women from throughout art history. Among them, a newly commissioned work draws inspiration from the embroideries made by generations of women from Liverpool that are held in the Cathedral’s archives.
Maria Loizidou creates a large-scale, crocheted installation which responds to the architecture of the building; a hanging tapestry of hand-embroidered migratory birds that can be found on Merseyside. Co-commissioned by Liverpool Cathedral, Loizidou’s thoughtful installation invites us to consider our relationship with nature and explores themes of migration, coexistence and survival in a constantly changing world.
Liverpool Central Library
In the Hornby Library, Dawit L. Petros presents a sprawling research project that aims to re-read a historic military expedition to the River Nile from 1884-1885 – a British-led expedition which included 379 Voyageurs from across Canada and Quebec including French Canadians, Western Canadians and First Nations. The installation, which has been developed through a residency at Liverpool John Moore’s University, includes sound, video, books and archive material gathered and created in response to Liverpool’s own archives related to shipping and empire. The artist also shows earlier work at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North.
Open Eye Gallery
The artists at Open Eye Gallery work with lens-based media and sculpture to conjure places that speak to their sense of identity. All three artists are reinterpreting stories, myths, lost traditions and memories to form new ones.
Nandan Ghiya’s new sculptural work, co-commissioned with Public Arts Trust India, interprets the Samudra Manthana – a major episode in Hinduism that translates to ‘churning of the ocean’ in Sanskrit. Drawing inspiration from the textiles and patterns of heritage buildings in both Liverpool and Jaipur, the artist creates ‘sculptural photographs’ to explore themes relating to the exploitation of natural resources, rising water levels and racial conflicts.
In Gallery 2, Widline Cadet presents an exhibition of photography works created between 2021 and 2024, centring around her family’s lived experience of emigrating from Haiti to the United States. The works explore the complexities of Black diasporic life and survival, as well as the fragility of memory, using motifs which refer to her past and her ancestry.
Upstairs, Katarzyna Perlak presents a new, collaborative film set in the bedrooms, hallways and ballrooms of the iconic Adelphi Hotel, once a popular destination for wealthy travellers on their way by boat to North America via Liverpool. Co-created with local award-winning filmmaking organisation First Take and participants from their REEL: Queer programme, the film adopts a non-linear, poetic narrative and references the genre of horror to explore longing and Queer identity. The artist also shows work at Walker Art Gallery.
Pine Court
Liverpool Biennial 2025 marks the return of the festival to Chinatown, at a point when the area is celebrating the past and looking ahead to the future. Both artists at Pine Court explore the construction of East and Southeast Asian identity within Western contexts.
Karen Tam 譚嘉文 presents a multimedia installation ‘Scent of Thunderbolts’, which addresses Chinese diasporic sonic memory in the form of a Cantonese opera. First created for Toronto Biennial 2024, the work draws inspiration from archival materials and conversations with community members, integrating reimagined elements from Cantonese opera including props, stage settings, backdrops and furniture.
Following a series of workshops with Liverpool residents, ChihChung Chang 張致中 will create a collective, temporary public artwork made of charcoal rubbings, arranged together to depict the city’s iconic Chinese Arch. The resulting film documenting the process will be exhibited at Pine Court.
Tate Liverpool + RIBA North
The artists at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North map the grounding relationships and places they carry with them, which include intimate familial and chosen family connections, and the idea of homeland as a place of both comfort and loss.
Hadassa Ngamba presents a work from her ‘Cerveau’ series, exhibited for the first time in the UK, which is based on cartographic enquiries into Congo’s history and psychological mapping of the terrains that exist within us. Richly layered, the surface is marked by paint and pigments from materials colonially extracted from Congo such as cobalt.
Mounira Al Solh presents works from her ongoing drawing and embroidery series ‘I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous’. The work from the Tate Collection, which includes three new drawings created for Liverpool Biennial 2025, records conversations Al Solh has had with displaced individuals, groups and families since 2012.
Further loans from the Tate Collection include works from Fred Wilson’s ‘Flag’ series, in which the designs of African and African diasporic countries’ flags are appropriated to create paintings drained of colour; Sheila Hicks’ ‘Grand Boules’ created using garments belonging to her friends and family and often referred to by the artist as ‘memory balls’; and Christine Sun Kim’s infographic drawings which each consider how sound operates in society, exploring the artist’s own relationship to spoken and signed languages, to her built and social environments, and to the world at large.
Further highlights include sculptural works by Cevdet Erek which measure the passing of time and relationships, photography and sculpture by Dawit L Petros and a new textile work by Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic.
The Black-E
At The Black-E, Liverpool’s pioneering arts and community centre, Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price presents a major single channel film, supported by RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects), which centres on the architectural history of Catholic Modernist churches in post-war Britain. The artist considers how their particular architecture manifests traces of trauma and anxieties of the time, whilst also telling a story of 20th century migration.
Walker Art Gallery
The artists at Walker Art Gallery offer densely material works that interweave practices which explore personal and colonial legacies, within an ornate building and national collection founded on the merchant wealth of the city.
Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic present a new work as part of their ‘Electronic Dub Station’ series, recently presented at the 60th Venice Biennale. Titled ‘Concrete Roots’, the site-specific installation examines themes of resilience, migration, ecological consciousness and textile traditions through the duo’s renowned use of indigo textiles and dub music soundscapes.
Leasho Johnson presents a series of densely pigmented large-scale paintings in which he creates abstract characters that reference his own lived experience to disrupt historical, political, stereotypical and biological expectations of the Black queer body.
Through sculpture, photo-collage, drawing, and textiles, Nour Bishouty investigates the impulses of tourism and sightseeing, foregrounding questions around permission and the production of fantasy. Bishouty’s multimedia installation, which was developed as a way to read a painting of a fictional landscape by the artist’s father, sits in conversation with works in the Walker Art Gallery collection, anchoring it in historical and cultural memory.
Jennifer Tee exhibits collages from her ongoing ‘Tampan Tulips’ series which draw inspiration from the colourful, geometric aesthetics of the traditional tampan textiles. Created using dried tulip petals, these works highlight the delicate and fleeting nature of life.
Further highlights include cast resin works of Dream Stones by Karen Tam 譚嘉文; a new, large-scale textile and embroidery work by Katarzyna Perlak; wall-based works by Cevdet Erek inspired by football stadia layouts; paintings and tapestries of fictional landscapes by Isabel Nolan; and a mosaic work by Petros Moris presented in the Sculpture Gallery.
20 Jordan Street
At 20 Jordan Street, the artists explore foundational references from the city including football stadia and naturally occurring materials such as plants and clay.
Cevdet Erek presents a new large-scale installation that replicates the atmosphere of a football stadium. Incorporating musical rhythms, whispered dialogue and crowd recordings, the work explores divisions and different forms of unity and belonging through the lens of football. The artist also shows work at Walker Art Gallery and Tate Liverpool + RIBA North.
In an installation comprising objects created using clay from local beaches and riverbeds, drawings and moving image, Imayna Caceres explores the concept of ‘lifer’ (mud full of life), as one of the possible meanings behind the word ‘Liverpool’. The work invites visitors to think about the worlds that lay out of sight in the ground beneath us, and the natural beings whose lives and labour have contributed to forming the city.