Reflections on the Liverpool Biennial x British Council Curators’ Week

In July 2025, a group of 8 international curators – Dian Arumningtyas, Hajra Haider Karrar, James Luigi Tana, Kakizi Jemima, Joel Lukhovi, Lilian Munuo, Nala Xaba and Parsa Sajid – visited Liverpool for the Liverpool Biennial x British Council Curators’ Week.

A week of events, discourse and networking began with curator-led tours at various LB2025 venues, including Bluecoat, Tate Liverpool + RIBA North, Open Eye Gallery, Pine Court, The Black-E and FACT Liverpool.⁠  The group then visited Bradford to hear from the team behind Bradford 2025 about this year’s city of culture programme, and experienced tours and exhibitions around the city.
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The week culminated with a Sector Day at Bluecoat, where peers from across the UK visual art sector were invited to connect with the Biennials Connect Curators Cohort. The day featured a Keynote from Yaa Addae and contributions from Liverpool Biennial Director Sam Lackey, LB2025 curator Marie-Anne McQuay and Vid Simoniti, ending with breakout sessions led by Vid and the visiting curators.⁠
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With thanks to the Biennials Connect 2025 Cohort who were selected via an open call, and are curators working across South Asia, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Read on for reflections on the programme.

Marie-Anne McQuay – Curator, Liverpool Biennial 2025

Jonathan Stubbs – British Council Visual Arts

“The Curator’s Week was designed to bring together curatorial professionals from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia to form meaningful connections and share outstanding cultural practice from all over the world.  We hope this will lead to future collaborations between international artists, curators and arts organisations, that bring excellent art and ideas to international and UK audiences.

Over the course of this year’s Liverpool Biennial Curator’s Week many connections were developed. We are delighted to hear that there are plans in the works for collaborative projects within the group, involving UK-based peers who share their curatorial interests. It is vital that we continue to create opportunities like this for connection wherever possible. We are very grateful to the team at Liverpool Biennial and all the curators for the energy and enthusiasm that they each brought to the programme.”

Biennials Connect 2025 Cohort:

Hajra Haider Karrar – Writer and Curator at SAVVY Contemporary (Germany) and Guest Curator of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka

“It is always a privilege to find kinship and solidarity with like-minded peers, especially in times when collective action feels not only urgent but necessary. Being one of the eight selected delegates for the Liverpool Biennial’s Connect Curators Week was an invaluable opportunity to find community among ourselves and within our engagements. With BEDROCK, Marie-Anne McQuay reflected on Liverpool’s layered histories with a sense of care and attentiveness, offering a nuanced lens into the city’s cultural composition. It was grounding where the new commissions included active community engagement that often unfolded in public spaces, seamlessly merging with the everyday and inviting broader forms of engagement. The week was a learning experience, marked by the opportunity to engage with both established institutions and long-standing community initiatives sustained entirely through voluntary service. The encounter with the Exhibition Research Lab was especially inspiring, offering insight into critical pedagogical approaches through exhibition making and exhibition historiographies. Additionally, the opportunity to share aspects of our own practices with creative professionals across the UK during the Sector Day was a rewarding experience, and the conversations and bonds formed with fellow delegates continue to grow, hopefully towards transregional collaborations. I remain grateful to the organizing and coordinating team for facilitating such a thoughtful, smooth, and generative experience.”

James Luigi Tana – Independent Contemporary Art Curator, Philippines 

“Deeply embedded in the city’s geological foundations, the theme for this year’s Liverpool Biennial “BEDROCK” further grounds its conceptual framework across variety of mediums and formats— from public installations to murals, from soft sculptures to textile works, from film and photography to moving image— showing interconnectedness across places and spaces, among people and communities. Perhaps, this idea of interconnectedness has become more apparent in the selection of venues, all within proximity of the city and accessible on foot— including a cathedral, a community garden, housing properties in China Town, as well as open spaces and pavements.

Participating in a week-long networking and development program, it prompts reflection on ways to build and foster meaningful connections through art. What do we do with these connections moving forward? How will others benefit from such connections, particularly the localities we come from? How do we distribute the values and knowledges gained from these connections?”

Joel Lukhovi – Artist, Curator and Co-founder of PiCHA Museum, Kenya

“My reflection on the Liverpool Biennial Curators’ Week is one of deep appreciation and learning. It proved both great and worthwhile, offering an opportunity to expand my imagination and reaffirm my fascination with the role of cultural exchange. I was reminded of how vital it is in our daily lives and in shaping curatorial and artistic practices across different contexts.

Among the spaces visited, Liverpool Cathedral was particularly striking, especially with the installation draped in the centre of its vast interior. It created a profound dialogue between faith, history and contemporary art. At Bluecoat, the conversations around migration and power brought to light pressing issues of displacement and identity, while Salts Mill in Saltaire resonated with themes of textile processes, labour, memory and how they continue to shape our imagination of the modern world.

The biennial’s overarching theme, Bedrock, felt powerful in the way it confronted Liverpool’s complex past. It did not shy away from dark histories but instead proposed ways of telling and retelling stories through art. Another highlight was the innovative use of a pharmacy and walkway as a gallery space, breaking away from traditional white cubes by allowing broader communities to engage with art in familiar environments.

One lesson I carry home to Kenya is the importance of rooting cultural practice within the community. Stories become more meaningful and layered when told from their foundations just as the Granby Gardens and Squash do. People actively shape narratives that reflect both their histories and futures and it is there that culture finds its most powerful meaning.”

Kakizi Jemima – Artist, Curator and Founder Impundu Arts, Rwanda

“As an advocate for African Women in visual arts, I was impressed by the Liverpool Biennial’s strong commitment to inclusivity, particularly through the significant representation of women artists. The Biennial offered meaningful perspective through its programming and the diversity of artistic expressions was inspiring, covering a variety of themes rooted in the city and encouraged participation by linking history and community.

I appreciated that the festival was free, making it accessible to everyone and reinforcing its commitment to engagement and inclusion with varied mediums to distinct artistic personalities, the works demonstrated the power of art to engage the local context while creating global dialogue. Odur Ronald’s installation stood out to me as it addressed the tension between free movement and border restrictions, highlighting systemic barriers that disadvantage African artists in international opportunities. Having different artists represent various issues or solutions allows us to learn from diverse perspectives and can serve as the beginning of positive change. 

I was pleased to have the opportunity to represent my culture through a workshop on sector day on ‘Imigongo’, a Rwandan traditional art form where participants were fascinated by the process of using cow dung to create artworks and I hope to see Rwandan artists sharing their perspectives on this impactful platform in the future.

The festival was a powerful platform for connecting, learning and imagining collective solutions in the art world. Thanks to Liverpool Biennial & the British Council and the team that made our experience exceptional.”

Lilian Munuo – Artist, Curator, Disability Rights Advocate and Founder of Beyond the Label Initiative, Tanzania

“Being part of this year’s Biennials Connect Curators Week was both grounding and expansive. As a Tanzanian multidisciplinary visual artist and disability rights advocate, I arrived in Liverpool curious about how large-scale international exhibitions can foster genuine accessibility and dialogue.

The week offered me a rare chance to meet curators, artists, and cultural workers from many parts of the world who are reimagining what a biennial can be. Conversations about inclusion, community engagement, and the responsibilities of cultural institutions resonated deeply with my own practice through Beyond the Label, an initiative that uses art to challenge perceptions of disability. I was especially inspired by the Sector Day presentations, where questions of sustainability and social justice were not treated as side notes but as central to curatorial thinking.

Visiting venues across Liverpool revealed how art can inhabit a city, transforming familiar streets into spaces of connection and discovery. I left with new relationships, fresh ideas, and a strengthened belief that accessibility is not only about physical space but also about narrative space: whose stories are told and how audiences are invited to participate. 

This experience reaffirmed my commitment to create work and platforms that open doors literally and figuratively, for people with disabilities in Tanzania and beyond. I am grateful to the Liverpool Biennial team and my fellow delegates for a week that felt like both a conversation and a call to action.”

Nala Xaba – Cultural Organiser, Curator, Writer-Researcher and Programmes Manager at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, South Africa

“The delegation programme was an extraordinary learning experience, both in terms of exposure to Liverpool’s cultural landscape and the exchange with peers from across the Global South. The itinerary was thoughtfully designed, offering a rich mix of institutional visits, encounters with cultural workers, and opportunities to engage with grassroots initiatives. This breadth of perspectives provided valuable insight into how cultural ecosystems are shaped through policy, funding, artist-led models, and community-driven practice.

Yet the most profound learning came through dialogue with fellow delegates. Our shared engagement with the Biennial’s BEDROCK theme anchored conversations that revealed both
resonances and divergences across our contexts. These exchanges stretched my thinking, sparked new ideas, and deepened my understanding of how cultural workers worldwide are grappling with common questions of history, solidarity, and sustainability. I believe many of the professional and personal connections seeded here will endure long beyond the programme.

What stood out most about the Biennial’s approach was its commitment to lasting impact. Rather than a one-off event, the programme prioritised continuity, whether through Sector Day, the Follow-On Fund, or the deliberate focus on mid-career practitioners – a group often overlooked despite being at a critical stage of growth and reinvention. This emphasis on sustainability and generative relationships ensures that the value of the experience extends well past a single week, rippling outward as participants carry insights, networks, and inspirations into our own contexts and the futures are we collectively shaping.”

Parsa Sajid – Writer, Researcher and Cultural Practitioner, Bangladesh

“Resting on ‘Bedrock’ as its thematic remit, the Liverpool Biennial 2025 displayed a stirring range entwining the whimsically ear-splitting, though still provocative (e.g., Kara Chin’s ‘Mapping the Wasteland: PAY AND DISPLAY’ 2025), with the historically bracing (e.g., ChihChung Chang’s ‘Port of Fata Morgana’ 2024). The foundations and locations which built and shaped Liverpool – primary of which was its position as a colonial and imperial trading hub, its role in the slave trade – also tethered it to bearings much heavier than geologic bedrocks since sedimented within are those plundering archives and chronicles. The present – both time and space – grinds heavy with similar extractive logics. The biennials of late have taken those questions to stage befuddled vagueness and generalizations, focusing more on the “biennials” part as in a prefab template, thankfully not so with Liverpool 2025 which took location seriously – tendrils, grit, substance, fables and all.

Where Bedrock succeeded was in embracing it in spirit without skidding on a smooth surface of literalism. Maria Loizidou’s ‘Where Am I Now?’ 2025, an imposing yet delicate metal crochet panel in the cathedral’s nave, was a shimmering homage to its grounds, architecture, and the birds around it, recalling both shelter and transience. In the video ‘The Land Beneath Sleeps Lightly’ 2025, Kataryzna Perlak assembles a riotous dreamscape of excess and abandon in the Adelphi Hotel, but what are dreams or even nightmares without the scope for escape and the excessive?

Outside the Biennial, Ann Hamilton’s deeply reflective ‘We Will Sing’ 2025 at Salts Mill in Bradford and a sun-dappled afternoon at the Granby Winter Garden enchanted, evoking Elaine Scarry in ‘On Beauty and Being Just’ (Princeton University Press, 1999: 47): “beautiful things, […], always carry greetings from other worlds within them.” But is any of it enough?“

Find out more about the British Council Biennials Connect Programme here.