BBC Free Thinking: The Liverpool Biennial Debate

Artwork by Dr Lakra

Slavery and empire building shaped Liverpool's development. Can art works help give a new understanding of the city's history?

In partnership with BBC Free Thinking, host Anne McElvoy is joined by Liverpool Biennial 2021 curator Manuela Moscoso, artist Xaviera Simmons, historian Dr Diana Jeater and composer Neo Muyanga.

Neo Muyanga is a composer and sound artist whose work traverses new opera, jazz improvisation, Zulu and Sesotho idiomatic songs. His project A Maze in Grace is a 12'' vinyl record and a video installation at the Lewis’s Building, inspired by the song “Amazing Grace”, composed by English slaver-turned-abolitionist John Newton, who lived in Liverpool. The piece was co-commissioned by Fundação Bienal São Paulo, echoing some of the trading links which operated in the transatlantic slave trade.

Xaviera Simmons has previously spent two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the transatlantic slave trade with Buddhist monks. Her installation at the Cotton Exchange Building uses images and texts set against backdrops of the American landscape to explore ideas about "whiteness". It's co-presented by Liverpool Biennial and Photoworks

Curator Manuela Moscoso has worked at the Tamayo Museo in Mexico City and has come up with a framework for the Biennial - The Stomach and the Port - that uses the body as an image to think about the city.

Historian Diana Jeater, from the University of Liverpool, is also Emeritus Professor of African History at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and teaches themes that help understand African history such as witchcraft and territorial cults, healing systems, nationalist movements and religious institutions.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod