Liverpool Biennial to explore catastrophe and aliveness

Liverpool Biennial will return in 2023 with more than 30 artists exploring "the thread between catastrophe and aliveness", its organisers have said.

The 12th edition of the UK's "largest free art festival" will be curated by South African artist Khanyisile Mbongwa and run from June to September 2023.

The event will be presented across the city, working in public spaces, historic sites and art venues.

Event director Sam Lackey said it would give "new perspectives on our city".

A Biennial representative said the festival had been titled "uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things", a title which uses the isiZulu word for spirit, breath, air, climate and wind.

Mbongwa said it had been chosen because while wind "often represents the fleeting and transient... I remember my first moment standing at the docks in Liverpool and feeling the wind in my bones".

She said it was the "same wind that made Liverpool the epicentre for the trade of enslaved people and a city that built itself through each 'merchant' ship".

"I wondered: 'How can this wind redraw the lines of cartography as pathways for a reckoning to occur [and] how can it gesture towards healing through implementing systems of care that would allow for a sacred return?'," she said.

"A return to self that aligns the celestial and ancestral, a return where one is not denied access to themselves, a return where all that is lost or stolen is acknowledged, remembered, accounted for, ignited and returned."

The Biennial representative said the event would explore the ways "in which people and objects have the potential to manifest power as they move across the world, while acknowledging the continued losses of the past".

"It draws a line from the ongoing catastrophes caused by colonialism towards an insistence on being truly alive," they said.

They added that the event would include a "dynamic programme of free exhibitions, performances, screenings, community and learning activities and fringe events" and shine a light "on the city's vibrant cultural scene".

Ms Lackey said she was "excited to bring the spirit of uMoya to the city of Liverpool".

"At this moment of global instability, the vision and experience of our curator brings a perspective of historic acknowledgement that ultimately proposes alternative futures for our world," she said.

"The geographical breadth of artists will provide new perspectives on our city that acknowledge its past and continued effects on the world and suggests new modes of repair, freedom and joy."

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