Across the weekend of Saturday 19 - Sunday 20 June, a series of varied and inviting satellite activations of works will bring The Stomach and the Port to life. Join us for informal pop-up performances, alongside guided tours and the opportunity to meet some of the artists involved in this year's festival.
To continue the Biennial’s tradition of animating unusual spaces, pop-up public events with this year’s artists will include Haroon Mirza’s participatory choral commission on the terraced piazza at Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral; Linder’s improvised dance and music performance outside her billboard Bower of Bliss (2021) on College Lane; and a new, durational movement and audio work by SERAFINE1369 in the garden at Bluecoat.
Other performative commissions taking place across the weekend will feature the documented dance performance Deader than Dead (2020) by Ligia Lewis, phonecalls with experts in clairvoyance in Luisa Ungar’s A Regurgitation is a Song is a Spell (Consultations to recreate the colonial disease) (2021), immersive taxi rides in Erick Beltrán’s Superposition (2021) and Godofredo Perreira’s performative lecture Ex-Humus, as well as guided tours across the city.
All events will observe government guidance and social distancing to ensure they can be enjoyed confidently and safely. For more information on the COVID-19 safety procedures we have put in place, click here.
Public Sculpture Tour
Saturday 19, 10 – 11am
Join Hyun Seo Chiang from the Liverpool Biennial Programme team on a tour around the city centre, exploring a selection of this year’s public sculptures, including Rashid Johnson’s Stacked Heads (2020), Teresa Solar’s Osteoclast (2021) Larry Achiampong’s Pan African Flags For the Relic Travellers’ Alliance forms part of Relic Traveller and Linder’s Bower of Bliss (2021), amongst others
Live Performance: Linder at Liverpool ONE, College Lane
Saturday 19 and Sunday 20, 11am – 2pm
Free, no booking necessary, drop-in
Throughout the Live Weekend, a series of 20-minute performances will take place in front of Linder's Bower of Bliss (2021) billboard. The activations will feature improvised dance by local dancer Lauren Fitzpatrick and Kirstin Halliday in response to music by composer and musician, Maxwell Sterling, to extend the key concepts and themes of Linder’s works in Tate Liverpool and in the billboard, reinforcing the need for safe and deeply pleasurable spaces within cities. Costumes by Louise Gray.
Film Performance: Deader than Dead by Ligia Lewis at The Black-E
Saturday 19 and Sunday 20, 11am – 6pm
Free, no booking necessary, drop-in
Ligia Lewis conceived and directed deader than dead in 2020 as an intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion in order to illustrate emotional distance. The dancers perform to Macbeth’s culminating soliloquy (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” a reflection on repetition and meaninglessness), which unfolds through the work in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis, and the void, each one tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample. Full of play and comedic tropes, the work is also a meditation on “playing,” or acting, as well as on tragedy’s recurring cycles and familiarity within Black and brown experience; on time, as it loops; on performance; on touch, as an act of both care and violence. Built in the form of a musical lament, it is a protracted complaint performed ad infinitum, decomposing itself along the way.
Live Performance: The Three /\/\/’s by Haroon Mirza at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral
Saturday 19, 2.15pm, 3pm, 3.45pm
Inspired by the ancient Indian Om, The Three /\/\/’s is a weekly choral ritual that has been taking place over the last few months in Liverpool. Participants in the ritual have been gathering to make the three sounds; oh, ah and mmm with their voice while standing in formation by adopting geometry derived from the Fibonacci sequence.
On this occasion, audience members will be asked to stand in formation to experience the work that inherently follows COVID safe guidelines. As an audience member you are also invited to participate in the ritual by mimicking the simple sounds emanating out from the centre.
There will be three performances of 8 minutes. Please arrive punctually allowing a few minutes to prepare. There will be no documentation and everyone present will participate in the ritual. Spaces are extremely limited to 15 bookable slots per performance., please book in advance
Ex-Humus: A lecture performance with Godofredo Perreira at The Black-E
Saturday 19, 5 – 6pm
In a performative lecture, architect and theorist Godofredo Pereira considers how exhumations are paradigmatic of extractive capitalism’s violence over peoples and environments. Exhumations reveal the bodies the earth holds and what these have to say, be it soil, mineral or human bodies As such, exhumations are sites where modes of relation to earth are both contested and re-imagined.
Family Friendly: Kinship Activity Craft Afternoon at Bluecoat
Saturday 19, 1 – 4pm
Free, no booking necessary, drop-in
Be inspired by Jorgge Menna Barretto’s mural Mauvaise Alphabet (2021) displayed on the side of the Bluecoat building in this drop-in session on the Bluecoat Platform, the new family friendly outdoor sculpture by artists Simon & Tom Bloor, to make some exciting collage work with all the Kinship Activity Sheets from each of the Biennial’s venues. All materials provided and hopefully the sunshine too!
Phonecall: A Regurgitation is a Song is a Spell (Consultations to recreate the colonial disease) by Luisa Ungar
Saturday 19, 7 – 9pm
Free, online, pre-book a call via Eventbrite
Book a phonecall with experts in clairvoyance. Ask a question, share a concern or an urgency.
Luisa Ungar has worked with a group of clairvoyants around various types of material from collections and archives in the city of Liverpool. The experts will be available to the public to answer questions via phone calls. Inspired by reports of contagion, hygienisation and witch-hunting, Ungar explores ways of reclaiming practices that were marginalized by the modern-capitalist world, revising forms of deprivation of women's voices in connection to local history.
Public Sculpture Tour
Sunday 20, 11am – 12pm
Join Abi Mitchell from the Liverpool Biennial Programme team on a tours around the city centre, exploring a selection of this year’s public sculptures, including Rashid Johnson’s Stacked Heads (2020), Teresa Solar’s Osteoclast (2021) Larry Achiampong’s Pan African Flags For the Relic Travellers’ Alliance forms part of Relic Traveller Linder’s Bower of Bliss (2021) amongst others.
Live Performance: SERAFINE1369 in the Garden at Bluecoat
Sunday 20, 2 – 8pm
I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) (2021) by SERAFINE1369 is set to an evolving soundscape. It was made in a moment when all that there was, was this body and its dreams, nightmares, cycles and needs, its sensations and wanting.
A durational performance inducing a state of expansiveness and detachment from the pressure to create - or be formed by - meaning through conventional narrative arcs. Its duration witnesses / tracks the rhythmic cycles, the peaks and troughs of an endocrine system beyond the arc of climax. The work situates a research and obsession with the unit of ‘one minute’ - asking whether we can transform the stuff of time or whether it transforms us. Considering the invention of colonial time and agency, the ways we inhabit its units of fixed endless measurement, even as this Time slips out of relation to the celestial bodies that have long been its anchor and justification.
Working with live and recorded text written over the last year from dreams and heartache and reflection - a wasteland of feeling - I I I (something flat, something cosmic, something endless) is a wide and flat landscape as score for performance. A reading, a listening, a movement.
Taxi Ride: Superposition (2021) by Erick Beltrán
Saturday 19 & Sunday 20
To book call ComCab Taxis on 0151 298 2222 (normal phone & taxi rates apply).
Take a taxi ride around Liverpool and experience the rhythmic world of Latin American Cumbia music, intersected by quantum physics, the primordial state and psychopomp in Erick Beltrán’s new commission Superposition (2021). The full Superposition commission, combining lights and music alongside the graphic designs, can be experienced across 5 taxis, while on display across the tip-seats of an additional 30 taxis are Beltrán’s graphic designs, complete with QR codes providing access to the accompanying audio.
