Liverpool Biennial: Angry Penguins, The Two-Sided Lake and Other Stories
Liverpool Biennial 2016 explores fictions, stories, histories and takes us through time and space in six episodes. Located in an actual place it draws from the past, present and future. These journeys take us to worlds in the form of exhibitions and in each encounter we learn more about the protagonists of these adventures into the multiverse.
All histories and practices are relevant, the language of the Avant Garde and modernism is as relevant as the relics from Ancient Greece that have been borrowed from National Museums Liverpool, and appropriated by artists in a contemporary mash-up. Koenraad Dedobbeleer has made prop-like sculptures that support and re-present fragments of Ancient Greek artifacts; feet, hands, body parts come together and create a monstrous recombinant Frankenstein-like figure – a hermaphrodite that has become the narrator of the exhibitions.
This episodic format invites artists to work together to take risks and to travel in time, making their work in Ancient Greece, Chinatown, The Children’s Episode, as Software and in the form of Monuments from the Future and sometimes as a Flashback. If the values of experimentation and innovation as well as pushing boundaries were defining qualities of the Avant Garde it could be argued that these artists are doing this. However historical tropes are contextual and located in time, as Gertrude Stein expressed so brilliantly:
“There is no there there”
The rest of this feature - by Sally Tallant, Director of the Liverpool Biennal - can be accessed in After Nyne 10. Available from the After Nyne Store priced at £8.99 plus P&P or from selected retailers.
