Liverpool Biennial 2023

The Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest contemporary visual arts festival is currently taking place across Liverpool’s public spaces, galleries and museums. This year's theme address the history of the city and as the name uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things suggests it explores ancestral knowledge and addresses the history and temperament of the city of Liverpool and is a call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing. In the isiZulu language, uMoya means spirit, breath, air, climate and wind.

The festival explores the ways in which people and objects have the potential to manifest power as they move across the world, while acknowledging the continued losses of the past. It draws a line from the ongoing catastrophes caused by colonialism towards an insistence on being truly alive.

It's pretty powerful and beautiful work and there's no better place to start your experience than the Tate Liverpool. Here. highlights include Isabel do Rosário’s largescale textile pieces, exhibited for the first time outside of Brazil, the first showing of Edgar Calel’s Ru k’ ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge) 2021 and Torkwase Dyson’s monumental Liquid A Place 2021 which directly converses with the brutal histories of the water and docks which surround the gallery.

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