The 13th Liverpool Biennial Celebrates a Vibrant World-City
Once dubbed the “New York of Europe,” Liverpool continues to leave a mark on art and culture. From a significant 18th-century imperial port city to the beating heart of rock band counterculture in the 1960s and the seat of a vibrant soccer passion, this city contains many lives and faces, a magnetic lifeforce honored at this year’s edition of the Liverpool Biennial, the largest free contemporary art event in the U.K.
Titled “BEDROCK,” the biennial opened earlier this month with an evocative theme asking artists and visitors to contend with foundations and energy. For its 2025 edition, the biennial presents the works of thirty artists and collectives, including dozens of new commissions, in eighteen sites across Liverpool, less than three hours from London by train.
For Marie-Anne McQuay, guest curator and a long-time Liverpool resident (she headed programs at Bluecoat, a local art institution with zest and one of the biennial’s sites), “bedrock” can channel several ideas. In her curatorial statement, she explains her interpretation of the term, linking it to geology, soil and long, mythical time. Bedrock also nods to the city’s “civic values haunted by empire” and the vital social as well as physical bedrock that spaces and loved ones provide us. As such, bedrock is a concept articulated in time and space, disputing notions of center, periphery and linearity.
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We quickly understand through this curation that Liverpool contains more than the sum of its parts. McQuay restituted Liverpool’s stature as a significant crossroad, a global meeting point, a place of deep, non-linear connections and dialogues. Historically, the city’s wealth was largely derived from its entanglements with the transatlantic slave trade and other economic extractions during the British Empire. Today, its richness is made fuller by hosting some of the oldest Black and Chinese communities in Europe and being a recent home for new immigrants boosting the city with new accents and multicultural dynamism.
For such an outward-facing city, it’s no surprise that migration and its ramifications feature so prominently across many of the biennial’s artworks. In Liverpool’s imposing cathedral we stagger upon Maria Loizidou’s Where Am I Now? (2025), a scintillating installation of monumental scale showing handwoven migratory birds rescuing fallen humans—asylum seekers—nodding not only to the human tragedy unfolding in the Mediterranean Sea close to Loizidou’s home of Cyprus but also to the legacies of the diverse migrants who have transformed Liverpool over time. Questioning our relationship with borders and freedom, Loizidou represents mythological birds such as the ibis as well as local species. This depiction of salvation and sanctuary seamlessly blends into the Cathedral’s architecture.
Elizabeth Price’s film HERE WE ARE (2025), shown a few steps away from the Cathedral, also speaks to the way that migration imprints beliefs and physical structures. The video essay looks at the modernist architecture of Catholic churches in Britain and their underpinning communities—the Irish, an instrumental workforce during WWII, particularly in arms factories and Africans more recently. The 2012 Turner Prize winner asks to what extent a building’s physical layers can be removed from its double and often ambiguous lens of community differentiation and belonging at a time of mainstream anti-migrant politics in the U.K.
In Liverpool’s old Chinatown, diasporic artists engage with representations and memory. ChihChung Chang’s wall mural Keystone (2025) reclaims public space and forms a visual continuum with the city’s Imperial Arch, the largest arch outside China and a manifesto for commune-like popular art. Meanwhile, Canadian artist Karen Tam activates Pine Court, a 1986 housing association, with an immersive installation recreating Chinese opera backstage and props (Scent of Thunderbolts 雷霆之息, 2024). The latter integrates so perfectly in the association’s venue that it acts as a trompe l’oeil at first, embodying the spirit of artifice found in theatre and entertainment.
Odur Ronaldâs work at Bluecoat for the 2025 Liverpool Biennial." width="970" height="1293" data-caption='Odur Ronald, <em>Muly’Ato Limu – All in One Boat</em>, 2025; at Bluecoat. <span class="lazyload media-credit">Photo: Mark McNulty</span>'>The biennial’s venues include outdoor spaces but also a shoe store and a pharmacy, a playful guerrilla curation to democratize art viewing, inviting visitors to embark on a treasure hunt for art nuggets across the city. For first-time Liverpool visitors, this is a treat. This diversity balances more mainstream venues and institutional spaces such as Tate Liverpool (temporarily located at the Royal Institute of British Architects North, or RIBA North, during refurbishments), the Walker Art Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Bluecoat and FACT Liverpool.
At Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, Mounira Solh’s portraits of exile and survival (I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, 2012-ongoing) showcase individual stories of resilience and loss, for example, from Sudanese and Syrian refugees. These testimonials ask us to contemplate what grounds human beings when their lives are brutally uprooted by war and violence. Solh’s drawings enter into conversation directly with Hadassa Ngamba’s cartography of systematic extraction. In Cerveau 2 (2019), Ngamba invites us to visualize the exploitation of minerals in her native Democratic Republic of the Congo through reimagined maps that evoke those of colonial explorations or geological surveys. In these two geographies—of the Arab world and of Central Africa—global solidarities can emerge and form a new “bedrock” against oppression.
In nearby Open Eye Gallery, Katarzyna Perlak and Widline Cadet celebrate intimacy and bonds as essential sparks of life. Perlak’s film The Land Beneath Sleeps Lightly (2025), set in Liverpool’s iconic Adelphi Hotel—a landmark stay for transatlantic travelers in the early 20th century—stages queer joy and hedonism tinged with horror. Aesthetically maximalist, the film becomes a hypnotizing visual poem to tolerance and queer love. In another room, Cadet’s sorority-filled portraits channel an otherworldly hazy effect where a family’s protective embrace transcends daily hardships in Haiti and perhaps this world also. In different registers, both artists engage with tenderness and the expanse of kinship.
Elsewhere, Indigenous sustenance and agency—incarnated in soil and lived through embodied presence—exist despite dispossession in the brilliant installations of Nour Bishouty and Imayna Caceres at the Walker Art Gallery and 20 Jordan Street, respectively.
This biennial’s vision comes together convincingly, and one credits McQuay for sublimating the city’s polyphony while articulating global resonances and commonalities. Her understanding of Liverpool’s pulse, fabric, ambition and darker recesses makes this a home run. It creates something bold, something that itches and sticks.
During the press viewing, Ugandan artist Odur Ronald led a performance near his installation Muly’Ato Lima – All in One Boat (2025), which sources aluminum to recreate an empty vessel where fictional passports of a “Republic of Opportunities” hang above amid empty chairs. The work superimposes the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade with the injustice of current visa enforcement policies that push asylum seekers and migrants to take dangerous maritime routes.
“Do you know how hard it is for someone like me to access spaces?” he asked. Not Liverpool, for once, and we’re all the better for it.
The Liverpool Biennial, “BEDROCK,” runs through September 14, 2025, in Liverpool.