Counter Culture at Liverpool Biennial 2023

The Counter Culture podcast is dedicated to amplifying the voices of artists, creatives and thinkers working on contemporary African and diaspora art. For Liverpool Biennial 2023, the team have put together a series of special programmes.

Given the sector’s growing market in the international art scene, the aim of Counter Culture is to build on the ways that key actors are reshaping and redefining African artists’ position in the international art market. ⁠
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In this collaboration, Counter Culture focuses on ‘The Middle Passage’ capturing thinking around oral histories and how this moment in the exhibition encouraged viewers to consider the process of healing in their transition to ‘The Reflective Return’ as they faced the unknown through the lense of Indigenous and the global Black diaspora. The vision for this collaboration was to amplify the Biennial’s mission to engage its audience with all five senses by creating a triangulation of navigational tools – of which the podcast was one.⁠
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Alongside our Liverpool Biennial 2023 Curator Khanyisile Mbongwa, the artists featured in this series offer their perspective on how their practice engaged with the Middle Passage to embody ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’.⁠
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Featured speakers include: ⁠
Khanyisile Mbongwa
Rudy Loewe
Isa do Rosário
Shannon Alonzo
Nicholas Galanin
Sepideh Rahaa
David Aguacheiro
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Music throughout the series is also provided by Nicholas Galanin.⁠

The podcast is hosted by Bonolo Madibe.

Khanyisile Mbongwa (Part 1)

This episode is a discussion with the 2023 curator for the Liverpool Biennial, Khanyisile Mbongwa. Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based independent curator, award-winning artist and sociologist who engages with her curatorial practice as Curing & Care, using the creative to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, joy and play. In part 1 of our discussion, we explore Mbongwa's curatorial process for the 2023 Biennial and how she came to the theme, uMoya: The Return of Lost Things.

Khanyisile Mbongwa (Part 2)

Part 2 of the discussion with Khanyisile Mbongwa explores her reckoning with Liverpool's colonial history and how it informed her curation of the 2023 Biennial.

David Aguacheiro

This episode explores artist David Aguacheiro's photographic installation 'Take Away' (2018), which highlights the ongoing extractivism (the removal of large quantities of raw or natural materials, particularly for export) of oil, sea life and essential natural resources from the artist’s home country of Mozambique.

Aguacheiro questions the value and ethics of consumer goods and trade, asking us to consider the devastating and long-term impact on the people and land which remain.

Nicholas Galanin

In this episode, Nicholas Galanin discusses his work 'Threat Return' (2023). The work is a reflection on what is considered to be theft, a meditation on the reflexivity of threat, and the return of energy as well as cultural property. Galanin insists on the persistence of Indigenous connection to land and culture which is embedded in bodies, memories, traditions, objects and languages.

Sepideh Rahaa

In this episode Sepideh discusses her work 'Songs to Earth, Songs to Seeds' (2022), which portrays the poetic but often invisible and inaccessible process of rice cultivation in the paddy lands of Mazandaran, Northern Iran.

Rahaa expands this familial history, where women play an integral role, to contemporary lives, where strong visual narratives are intertwined with local songs sung by Iranian women. The songs contain stories of their daily struggles in Mazani (an indigenous language from Northern Iran) and are passed from grandmothers to mothers and daughters to be sung during the cultivation and harvest seasons.

Isa do Rosário

This episode is explores Isa do Rosário's textile work, 'Dance with Death on the Atlantic Sea' which was produced in the period of 2013-2023.

This piece represents the life and death at the bottom of the sea. On one half, we see small black dolls named Abayomi. Meaning ‘precious meeting’ in Yoruba language, here, the artist uses them to represent Black people and bodies, a memorial to all those who lost their lives during the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The work creates a meditation space that, via the Orixás, hopes to offer safe passage for the souls that linger in the depths of the ocean. The artist creates a portal for an ascension, a pilgrimage of souls returning home and a mourning space that holds Black death and passing. In particular, do Rosário asks us to remember those who were stripped of their names and as such, have since been forgotten.

This conversation is translated by Alexandra Romanini, Partner at Mitre Galeria, the gallery that current represents Isa's work.

Rudy Loewe

In this episode, Rudy Loewe discusses 'The Reckoning' (2023), a large-scale installation based on the artist’s painting ‘February 1970, Trinidad #1′, which depicts Moko jumbie (a stilt walker) and other Carnival mas players (participants who wear masquerade costumes and march in the parade) coming to the aid of the people at a moment of Black Power revolution in Trinidad and Tobago.

For Liverpool Biennial 2023, these spirits are transported to the site of The Old Dock, constructed in the 18th century. Here, they confront Britain’s colonial legacy which reverberates into our present. The piece harnesses the natural elements of light and wind to playfully demand attention, casting shadows on this history and the reckoning that is yet to happen.

Shannon Alonzo

We close off season 1 in a discussion with Shannon Alonzo on her works 'Mangrove' (2023) and 'The Lowest Hanging Fruit' (2018).

Mangrove references the entangled forms of Mangroves – a group or system of trees and roots which grow in coastal, tropical climates – Alonzo has created a site-specific mural of charcoal and paint which explores the Caribbean Carnival’s relationship to space: claimed and embodied, geographic and ideological.

Like the mangroves of Trinidad, an enmeshed root system living on the fringes of land and sea, the Carnival has historically provided a place of refuge and stabilization for countless marginalised peoples.

The Lowest Hanging Fruit on the other hand, aims to create a connection, or draw a thread, between past and present. Alonzo etches, stitches, draws and moulds as a way of making the rich but often forgotten or silenced archive of the Caribbean community more tangible. She attempts to counteract years of historical erasure, lost archives and remnants of colonial legacy which often obscures progress towards collective belonging and a deeper understanding of the self for Caribbean people. Through often labour-intensive ways of working, Alonzo comes to understand and celebrate the collective experience of the people of Trinidad and Tobago and pay homage to their ancestors who walked before.