Returning for Liverpool Biennial 2025, our podcast series 'Art Against the World' allows you dig deeper into the themes of our 13th edition 'BEDROCK'.

12 artists in this event

Presented by Vid Simoniti and with contributions from LB2025 curator Marie-Anne McQuay, the six episodes unpick the central idea of this year’s exhibition: Bedrock. In an often polarised and fragmented world, what remains our bedrock? What are the things that ground us? We speak to artists and thinkers to uncover different answers: from a shared family, history, or culture, to a critique of the economic and political realities that undergird our everyday experiences.

You can listen to the episodes in order, or by scanning the QR codes next to the artworks exhibited around the city. Each episode features two LB2025 artists, and puts them in conversation with a thinker, performer or writer.

Click here to listen on Spotify

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts

 

Episode 1: Chosen Families

Seven artworks on a white wall held up with small wooden stands. The top line shows three seascape photographs and the bottom line shows two pencil drawings with two pieces of writing.

Amber Akaunu, Untitled, 2023. Iniva ‘Can publications be porous’ group show. Photo by Emile Holba.

A collage of photographs with hand drawn elements overlaid.

Alice Rekab, Isatu An Ee Cat, 2021. Courtesy of the Artist.

How do families inspire artists today? Artist Alice Rekab draws on their Irish and Sierra Leonian ancestry to recover a sense of belonging. Film-maker Amber Akaunu explores single parenting in her film about ‘other mothers’: women who help single mums raise their children. Actor, writer and activist Felix Mufti describes how intergenerational queer communities shape chosen families in Liverpool. We also explore how this year’s exhibition responds to the historical origin of the Bluecoat gallery, which began life as a charity school for orphaned children.

 

Coming soon…

 

Episode 2: The Historical and the Personal

A display case of history books and a metal curved structure on top of the case.

Dawit L. Petros, The Open Boat, 2024. 3D Print. Courtesy of the Artist and Tiwani Contemporary, London. Photography by Dawit L. Petros

Five square artworks on a white gallery wall, they have repetitive patterns and symmetrical shapes on them. In the foreground there is a fabric work on the floor.

Jennifer Tee, Still Shifting, Mother Field, Secession, Vienna, AT, 2022. Co-produced with Kunstinstituut Melly, 2023. Photography by Oliver Ottenschläger.

Our histories can unite us, but they can also haunt us. The artists we talk to respond to ghosts of the past by interweaving historical narratives with reflection on their personal lives. Dawit L Petros investigates the archives of the empire to track down an unlikely 19th century adventure up the River Nile. Jennifer Tee recovers nearly forgotten Indonesian textile crafts, which inspire her life-affirming collages made of tulip petals. Michelle Peterkin-Walker, a Liverpool-based videographer, shares her archive of Liverpool’s African diasporic culture.

 

Episode 3: Layers of the City

A blacked out space with a black and white film projected on a screen. In the space there are two red platformed structures used for people to sit and watch.

Elizabeth Price, THE WOOLWORTHS CHOIR OF 1979, Installation view. Photography by Michael Pollard

An architectural installation in a large white space. The installation is a black structure of stairs that leads up to a platform with a surrounding balcony barrier. Within the outer structure, white speakers are embedded.

Cevdet Erek, Bergama Stereo, 2019. Hambuger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by Matthias Volzke.

Cities are continuously built over, and so their histories begin disappearing. We discuss how attention to architecture uncovers lost social memory. Vid takes a walk around Liverpool with writer Jeff Young, whose book Ghost Town conjures memories latent in the city’s buildings. Turner-prize winner Elizabeth Price relates how Catholic modernist churches reflect the social history of the Irish diaspora. Artist Cevdet Erek channels memory of football stadiums into his audio-sculptural installations, revealing political struggles past and present.

Episode 4: Materials That Make Us

Two 2D artworks created with wax, on a dark green wall. The first artwork is a brown abstract piece and the second is detail of a reptile's body with a bright yellow background.

Linda Lamignan, Oghonowe Abede, 2023 and Di, 2023. Petroleum wax with pigment on wooden panel. 200 x 140 cm. Photo by Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo.

Fifty-three rectangle pieces of bronze aluminium lined up on a large black board. The aluminium has the cover of a passport etched into them.

Odur Ronald, Fena (all of us), 2024. Courtesy Darlyne Komukama.

Cobalt is in our phones, 50% of packaged goods contain palm oil and microplastics have been detected in human placentas. Globally traded materials are, for better or for worse, the everyday bedrock of our society. Artist Linda Lamignan explores their dual heritage from two oil economies, Norway and Nigeria, and explains how animism can inform a different understanding of natural resources. Artist Odur Ronald makes use of aluminium in his sculptures, highlighting parallel routes of global migration and extraction of resources from Africa today. Art historian Stephanie O’Rourke explains the complex relationship artists have always had to the materials traded through global networks since the age of industrialization.

Episode 5: The Oldest Chinatown

A yellow and blue lit room installation with yellow and blue pipes of fabric hung at the sides. In the centre of the room are four wooden benches facing a living room set that has sheer curtains, a chair and hanging fabric. There is a cardboard cut out of a tiger on the right of the set.

Karen Tam 譚嘉文, Scent of Thunderbolts, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Toronto Biennial of Art. Photography by Toni Hafkenscheid

Three overhead projectors facing a wall, projected on the curved wall are black and white stills of the sea with scaffolding in the distance.

ChihChung Chang, Port of Fata Morgana (video installation partial), 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Photography by ChihChung Chang

Liverpool has the oldest Chinatown in Europe, dating back to the 1830s. We explore how the concept of Chinatowns around the world has changed and how it remains a cultural bedrock for the communities that inhabit it. Artist Karen Tam takes us into the domestic spaces above Chinatown restaurants through an installation that evokes Cantonese opera playing in her grandmother’s bedroom. Artist ChihChung Chang recalls growing up in the Taiwanese port of Kaohsiung and examines the complexity of Chinese identity abroad. Liverpool-based musician and community organiser Zi Lan Liao explains the significance of preserving music across generations, while researcher Emily Beswick highlights how this bustling city quarter was constructed across various waves of migration.

Episode 6: The Soil and the Rock

A film still of a red tinted scene of crowds of people with a fire in the distance. At the bottom of the still, it reads 'shake, vibrate, transmutate', in yellow text

DARCH (Umulkhayr Mohamed and Radha Patel), Grief Rage Ritual Film, 2024. Film Still. Courtesy of artists.

A ghost-like mosaic grey figure sculpture, there is a folder on the head section of the figure with plastic wallets inside which show smaller 2-D artworks.

Petros Moris, Ghost (ALONE) V, 2024. Courtesy the artist and TAVROS space. Photography by Stathis Mamalakis

In the final episode we dig deeper into the literal, terrestrial bedrock of Liverpool: the inspiration for this year’s theme of the Liverpool Biennial exhibition. Artist collective DARCH share how their work unearths an optimistic view of the underworld, uniting life and mortality through their sacred soil rituals. Artist Petros Moris creates artworks that evoke layers of archaeological time in his Greek hometown. Geologist Anjana Khatwa explains where the city’s beautiful red sandstone comes from and how it connects us to the deep history of our planet.