Once Liverpool is called “New York Europe”, it will continue to leave traces of its own artistic and cultural heritage. From a major 18th-century imperial port city to the beating heart of rock band counterculture in the 1960s, home to the vibrant soccer enthusiasm, the city has many lives and faces, this year’s two-year magnetic vitality of Liverpool, the largest free art event in the UK, the largest free art event in the UK
Titled “Bedrock,” an evocative theme opened earlier this month, requiring artists and visitors to compete with the foundation and energy. In the 2025 edition, the Biennale presents the works of thirty artists and collectives, including dozens of new committees, at eighteen locations in Liverpool, less than three hours from London to train.
For Marie-Anne McQuay, a guest curator and longtime Liverpool resident (her plan at Bluecoat (the local art institution with passionate local art institution and biennial website), “Kidlock” can guide several ideas. She explains the interpretation of the term in a curatorial statement, linking it to geology, soil and a long and fabulous era. Bedrock also nodded to the city’s “civil values wrestled by empires” and the important social and physical cornerstones that space and loved ones provide us. Therefore, bedrock is a concept illuminated in time and space, controversial about the concepts of center, surrounding and linearity.
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Through this planning, we quickly understood that Liverpool included more parts. McQuay restored Liverpool’s status to a major crossroads, a global gathering point, a place of deep, nonlinear connections and conversations. Historically, the city's wealth stems from entanglements with the transatlantic slave trade and other economic extractions during the British Empire. Today, its richness is to promote the city’s latest home by hosting some of Europe’s oldest black and Chinese communities and becoming the new immigrants with new accents and multicultural dynamics.
For such an extroverted city, it is no surprise that migration and its consequences are so prominent among many biennial artworks. In Liverpool's majestic cathedral, we're about Maria Loizidou Where am I now? (2025), a huge scale installation showing that hand-woven migratory birds rescued the fallen man-seeker- not only introduces human tragedy in the Mediterranean close to Loizidou of Cyprus, but also involves residences in Loizidou of Cyprus of Cyprus, but also transforms the heritage of diverse immigrants Liverpool. In questioning our relationship with borders and freedom, Loizidou represents mythical birds, such as ibis and local species. This description of salvation and sanctuary seamlessly blends the architecture of the cathedral.
Elizabeth Price's movie We're here (2025) shows a few steps away from the cathedral and also illustrates the way immigration beliefs and physical structures are constructed. The video article looks at the modernist architecture of the Catholic Church in Britain and its foundational communities – the Irish, the instrumental workforce during World War II, especially in arms factories and Africans. 2012 Turner Award winners ask that the physical layer of a building can be removed from multiple and often ambiguous community differences lenses and belong to the mainstream anti-immigration politics period in the UK
In Liverpool's Old Chinatown, scattered artists interact with representation and memory. Chihchung Chang's murals Keystone (2025) restored public spaces and formed a visual continuity with the city’s Imperial Arch, the largest arch outside China and the commune-like pop art manifesto. Meanwhile, Canadian artist Karen TamThe smell of lightning2024). The latter is so perfectly integrated in the association’s venue that it was initially a trompe l'Oeil, embodying the spirit of skill found in drama and entertainment.
The venues for the Biennale include outdoor spaces, but also include a shoe store and a pharmacy, a playful guerrilla curation to democratize the viewing art, inviting visitors to start a treasure hunt in search of art blocks throughout the city. It's a treat for first-time Liverpool visitors. This diversity balances more mainstream venues and institutional spaces, such as Tate Liverpool (temporarily located at the Royal Institute of Architects North or Riba North, during renovation), Walker Art Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Bluecoat, Bluecoat and Fact Liverpool.
Portrait of Exile and Survival in Tate Liverpool + Riba North, Mounira Solh (I firmly believe in our right to frivolity2012) shows personal stories of personal resilience and losses of Sudan and Syrian refugees. These recommenders ask us to consider what the reason human life is when war and violence are uprooted. Solh's drawings directly talked with Hadassa Ngamba's system extraction and drawing. exist Sevo 2 (2019), Ngamba invites us to evoke a map of colonial expeditions or geological surveys through reimagined maps. In these two geographical locations (geographical regions of the Arab world and Central Africa), global solidarity may emerge and form a new “cornerstone” against oppression.
In the nearby Open Eye Gallery, Katarzyna Perlak and Widline Cadet celebrate intimacy and bonds, the basic spark of life. Perak's movie Sleep slightly below the land (2025), located in Liverpool’s iconic Adelphi Hotel, a landmark accommodation for transatlantic travelers in the early 20th century – the strange Joey and hedonism are frightening. Aesthetically, the film becomes a shocking visual poem to achieve tolerance and queer love. In another room, the trainee-filled portrait channel has a remarkable vague effect, with the family’s protective embrace in Haiti and perhaps the world. In different registers, both artists are full of tenderness and kinship.
Elsewhere, while the wonderful installations of Nour Bishouty and Imayna Caceres were deprived of indigenous sustenance and agents in the soil (both exist in the soil and live through the manifested existence).
The vision of this biennale is convincingly blended together, with McQuay sublimating a voice in the city while expressing global resonance and commonality. Her understanding of Liverpool's pulse, fabric, ambition and dark dents made it home run. It produces something bold, itchy and sticky.
During media viewing, Ugandan artist Odur Ronald led a show near the installation Muly'ato Lima – All boats (2025), the aluminum source is to rebuild an empty ship with a fictional passport of the “Republic of Opportunity” hanging on empty chairs. This work superimposes the trauma of the transatlantic slave trade with the injustice of current visa enforcement policies that drive asylum seekers and immigrants to take dangerous maritime routes.
“Do you know how difficult it is for someone like me to enter the space?” he asked. Not once Liverpool, we will be better about it.
this Liverpool Biennale“Bedrock” lasted until September 14, 2025 in Liverpool.
