Liverpool Biennial 2020 2021: Press Launch.

Art What with one thing or another, this year's Liverpool Biennial has been postponed until next year. The opening date of next March still feels relatively optimistic, contingent on good distribution of a vaccine and relying on volunteers enforcing COVID safe rules.  Nevertheless, it's full steam ahead and the press launch was this morning.

I forgot. 

After falling asleep in the chair post-porridge as usual (its an anxiety exhaustion thing) then going for my morning walk to get the paper and listen to last night's The Rachel Maddow Show and all the outrage about Michael Flynn's pardon it slipped what's left of my mind. 

Fortunately, since piling up to a hundred people into an education room at Tate Liverpool or the Playhouse theatre isn't really possible or ideal right now, the programme has been made available via a recorded stream (uncomfortably positioned above because Vimeo hates embeds) and a list of artists and a press release about one of the venues.

So no photographs of half eaten croissant or confusion over embargoes.  About an hour ago I clicked the watch link on the video and that's all the "on the scene" blogging colour you're going to get because that's all there is.  Dammit 2020.

After the underwhelming mishmash of 2018 (which I didn't even review on here because of the Thumper rule), the Biennial now has a whole new creative team led by director Fatos Üstek, with this year's show guest curated by Manuela Moscoso of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and a veteran of numerous other Biennials.

This year's title is "The Stomach and the Port" and a theme of "the body" and "notions of the body and ways of connecting with the world" which is a return to the non-specific open tent approach of some of the best of the Biennials in which it is up to the spectator to speculate on how the works are connected to one another.

As ever, I'm trying to keep myself relatively spoiler free although Jenna Sutela's work sounds as though it's going to be very impressive, with its reference to a specific type of mold.  If it's anything like her PLANTSEX installation as featured in this Serpentine video, I only hope there's some decent chairs and an adequate toilet, because I'll be in front of it for hours.

The introductory page has a list of venues, all the old favourites including some which essentially opted out of 2018 or have previously only been inhabited by the Independents strand:

The Biennial programme is presented in locations across Liverpool, including public spaces, historic sites and the city’s leading art venues: Bluecoat, Liverpool Central Library, Cotton Exchange Building, Exchange Flags, FACT, National Museums Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery, St George's Hall, Tate Liverpool and Victoria Gallery & Museum. New for 2021, Liverpool Biennial’s reach will also expand to the city’s historic Lewis’s Building.

Yes! In a return to previous Biennial adventures in semi-derelict edifices, part of this year's show will be on two floors of the Lewis's building with an impressive sixteen artist's work which suggests this will be a massive space.  

Other than that, there isn't much else about how this will be structured, where Bloomberg New Contemporaries will reside, that sort of thing.  Looks like City States is now gone for good but its last hoorah at Copperas Hill was a worthy conclusion and I should probably move on.

I'm incredibly optimistic about this new installment.  It feels more accessible somehow and a return to some old principles.  We'll see.  I just hope that in these blighted times this new body is able to show itself in all of its glory.