(Above) Laura Belém, The Temple of a Thousand Bells (2010). Installation with sound. Music composed by Fernando Rocha. Image: Alex Wolkowicz, courtesy the artist
Exhibition: Liverpool Biennial 2010, various venues, Liverpool, September 18th – November 28th 2010
With a reported 975,000 visits in 2008, Liverpool Biennial is one of the world's best-attended festivals of visual art. Venice, by comparison, drew just 375,702 to a record-breaking Biennale last year.
In the aftermath of its stint as European Capital of Culture, Merseyside's event has upped its game by making its sixth Biennial the largest to date. This year it offers 45 site specific commissions and more than 10 indoor exhibitions. As before, it has a reach far beyond the walls of the city's many galleries.
Accessible public art is the mainstay of this Biennial. The most high profile works form a citywide exhibition called Touched, in which site specific art reaches out to neglected urban spaces.
"Too much art has succumbed to a bloodless and decorative intellectualism incapable of acting in or on the world," claims Lewis Biggs, Artistic Director of the project. "Touched celebrates emotion as the essential ingredient of significant art."
Laura Belém’s installation is sure to make an impression on a Grade I-listed Oratory near Liverpool Cathedral. A thousand hand-blown glass bells and a 3D soundscape place the viewer in a mythical temple on an island which sinks into the sea.
Meanwhile, Kris Martin hangs up a seven-metre Medieval Sword of Damocles, Alfredo Jaar creates a red-themed lounge where you can re-evaluate Marx, and Raymond Pettibon uses mixed media to play off the existing graffiti in a derelict building.
Seven contributors line up to window dress the 200-metre shopfront at a former hardware store, eight international painters put on a show comprising of work not seen before in the UK, and Tania Bruguera stages the final act of her Cátedra Arte de Conducta with actions by 20 artists from Cuba.
Work by Hector Zamora will form one of the new commissions for Touched. Image: Liverpool Biennial
Also getting into the public spirit of Touched, Tate Liverpool is holding its first free exhibition. Magdalena Abakanowicz, Otto Muehl and Franz West, who in the 1960s and 1970s challenged the notion that art should be static and gallery-bound, have been brought together with a new generation of artists doing the same.
Across town, four new commissions for FACT include a dreamlike animation by Yves Netzhammer and some heat sensitive camera work by Minouk Lim. They are also providing a long overdue European show about Tehching Hsieh's legendary performance Time Clock Piece.
A performance element is also on offer at A Foundation Liverpool. Sachiko Abe exhibits the results of punishingly long drawing sessions and Antti Laitinen installs a boat made from Finnish bark which he also promises to launch upon the Mersey.
Belgian artist Kris Martin also has a commission in Touched. Image: Liverpool Biennial
More than 70 contemporary artists will respond to the festival's urban setting with a series of seven international shows in converted 19th warehouses in the city's Baltic Triangle area. CityStates is due to focus on Jerusalem, Vilnius, the Caribbean, Scandinavia, Quebec, Taipei and Seoul.
Another major Liverpool contribution to the UK art scene hits the news on September 16 2010 as the winner of The John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize is announced on live webcast. Work by all 45 finalists can be seen at Walker Art Gallery from the 18th.
Elsewhere, artist collectives come together at The Cooperative, up-and-coming UK artists can be seen at the Bloomberg New Contemporaries show, and S.Q.U.A.T. begin a drive to re-animate abandoned public spaces.
For ten weeks at least, the North-West will have the capital of art. If Venice has kudos and gondolas, Liverpool has the popular touch and a no less famous ferry.
For opening times, admission details and directions visit the Biennial website.
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