LB2021: Live Weekend

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, alongside guided tours across the city, bringing The Stomach and the Port to life.

To ensure the public’s safety, Liverpool Biennial will observe government guidance and social distancing.

Live Weekend: Saturday 19 June

Public Sculpture Tour 

Beginning at 10am. Meet inside the courtyard at Bluecoat.

Free, booking necessary via Eventbrite. 

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 Bower of Bliss (2021)

From 11 – 2pm, Liverpool ONE, College Lane.

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

From 11 – 6pm at The Black-E.

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

2.15pm, 3pm, 3.45pm at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

Free, booking necessary via Eventbrite.

Join in the observance of Haroon Mirza’s newly commissioned choral work The Three ///’s (2021), supported by Open Culture, which explores social gatherings and ritual, informed by the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio. In collaboration with Mirza, Liverpool-based choir leader Jenifer John leads an ensemble of performers, made up of Anne Taft, Emma Bispham, Jennifer John and Tayo Aluko to evolve the vocal interpretations of the ritual. Taking place on the Cathedral’s terraced piazza, audiences are invited to participate in each 8-minute cycle of the commission by mimicking the sound, emanating out from the heart of the choir.

Ex-Humus: A lecture performance with with Godofredo Perreira

From 5 – 6pm at The Black-E.

Free, booking necessary via Eventbrite.

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.

Dr. Godofredo Enes Pereira is an architect and researcher. He is the Head of Programme for the MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London. Prior to joining the RCA, he taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He was a member of Forensic Architecture where he led the Atacama Desert project. For the past decade Godofredo has been conducting research, publishing and exhibiting on environmental architectures and collective politics. He’s the author of the book Savage Objects (Lisbon, 2012), is currently preparing the publication of ‘Ex-Humus: Territorial Politics from Below’, and together with Susana Calo has recently been awarded a Graham Foundation Grant for the publication of ‘CERFI: Militant Analysis, Institutional Programming and Collective Equipment’.

Family Friendly: Kinship Activity Craft Afternoon

From 1 – 4pm at Bluecoat.

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!

• Download a Kinship Activity Pack here
• Discover a range of exciting activities to complete at home by exploring our digital Learning Resource Library here

Phonecall: A Regurgitation is a Song is a Spell (Consultations to recreate the colonial disease) by Luisa Ungar

Timeslots from 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.

Live Weekend: Sunday 20 June

Public Sculpture Tour

Beginning at 11am. Meet inside the courtyard at Bluecoat.

Free, booking necessary via Eventbrite.

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: Linder at Bower of Bliss (2021)

From 11 – 2pm at Liverpool ONE, College Lane.

Free, no booking necessary, drop-in.

Film Performance: Deader than Dead by Ligia Lewis

11 – 6pm at The Black-E.

Free, no booking necessary, drop-in.

Live Performance: SERAFINE1369 

Between 2 – 8pm in the garden at Bluecoat.

Free, book to visit Bluecoat via Eventbrite.

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

To book call ComCab Taxis on 0151 298 2222 (normal phone & taxi rates apply). Subject to availability. 

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.

Press

Access the full press release here.

For further information please contact:

Susie Gault, Press & PR Advisor, Liverpool Biennial at susie@biennial.com