A tribute to the history and personality of the city of Liverpool – the goal for BEDROCK, the 13th edition of the Liverpool Biennial. In an exclusive interview, the Biennial’s curator, Marie-Anne McQuay, discusses how the event connects with the city’s past and present by delving into the city’s rich heritage through its unique geography, social history, and urban landscape, and how its growing collection of permanent public artworks enrich the city.
Opening on June 7, 2025, this year’s edition of Liverpool Biennial promises to build on its remarkable legacy as the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary art. The 14-week programme showcases international and emerging artists through citywide exhibitions, installations, and public art commissions. Since its start in 1998, the Biennial has been instrumental in Liverpool’s cultural renaissance, commissioning over 400 artworks and collaborating with local communities through dozens of neighbourhood projects. The festival consistently draws more than 100,000 visitors, contributing significantly to both the city’s economy and its reputation as a leading arts destination. Working closely with museums, galleries, and cultural institutions across Liverpool, the Biennial creates an avenue where contemporary art is accessible to the community, fostering dialogue between artists, audiences, and the urban landscape.
The interview was conducted in February 2025. The Biennial’s programme has been announced now.
Niccolò Lucarelli: How did you come up with the Biennal’s theme?
Marie-Anne McQuay: Bedrock is the term for holding space when thinking about Liverpool Biennial 2025 – it’s a part of the city’s distinctive geography with bedrock as the beliefs which underpin its social foundations. I started with the city’s geological foundations, with the yellow and red sandstone that forms its bedrock – the foundational layer of solid rock under its soil. It is also used in its pavements and grand civic buildings and is visible in the former quarry upon which the Anglican Cathedral now sits, as well as in the train tunnels that cut through the rock of the city. This solid layer has a metaphorical meaning, too, as a foundation of beliefs and values – I thought about how this might speak to the city’s own social and civic values and its unique psyche.
To widen the theme, I asked the invited artists to share their own sense of “bedrock”, the values, people, and places that ground them. Often, these recollections evoke a sense of loss as well as joy, whether that is from the separation from people, language, migration from the homeland, or being at a distance from a former way of life or environment. This sense of loss is also echoed in the way that the BEDROCK title encompasses Liverpool’s colonial past. Just as sandstone is found across the foundations of the city, so does it form the base layer of the Old Dock, which was so pivotal for the city’s growth through the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. The bedrock that runs beneath Liverpool Biennial 2025, in material and metaphorical form, is therefore always haunted and shadowed by empire.
N.L.: How would you describe the Liverpool art scene?
M.-A.Q.: Liverpool and its wider city region are vibrant and self-driven, with a breadth of practice and a long history of painting reflected in the present. There are two art schools in the city centre, Liverpool School of Art & Design at Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Hope University, plus a number of artist studios including Bridewell Studios, Arena Studios, Bold Place, and The Royal Standard, so there is a real concentration of artists here. Additionally, there is Make CIC, which has venues for makers across the region, a studio complex in Toxteth, Aspen Yard and activity in the wider region, including the Convenience Gallery, which has taken up space in a park and an empty shopping centre on the Wirral. Art in Liverpool and Liverpool Artist Network help to shine a light on what’s happening and share opportunities. Then, Double Negative and Corridor8 provide critical feedback locally, regionally, and nationally.
However, I’m very aware that access to grassroots showing space and project spaces here is much harder than it was in the twentieth century, both in terms of permanent and “meanwhile” space. Everyone misses a fantastic space called OUTPUT that focused on work by artists from Liverpool and those living in Liverpool. As well as more access to affordable space, artists desperately need more direct funding for their practice here in Liverpool and the wider UK. I am delighted that the artist-led Independents Biennial is back with funding this year – it’s the first time since 2018 – and I know they will make a huge impact on LB2025 through their work with artists living and working in the six boroughs of Merseyside. The Independents started at the same time as the first Liverpool Biennial festival in 1999.
“Liverpool and its wider city region are vibrant and self-driven, with a breadth of practice and a long history of painting reflected in the present.”
— Marie-Anne McQuay
N.L.: How does the Biennial interact with the city, then? Is there a programme of events specifically dedicated to it and the public?
M.-A.Q.: Liverpool Biennial first emerged from the city in the late 1990s, so now it’s very much part of the fabric of the city and its regular cultural calendar. LB2025, like previous Liverpool Biennials, is layered and responsive – of course, I’ve selected existing artworks or works made elsewhere – but there are also many commissions that emerge from collaborations with sites, archives, collections, and most importantly, with people here. It’s a biennial that you can see on foot and can easily be walked within a day; walking routes through established neighbourhoods, historic quarters, and new civic zones was one way I went about developing new works with artists. This included taking time to dwell in Liverpool’s green spaces, which support plant, insect, animal, and bird life in unexpected ways through planned and unplanned urban developments. These reflections have informed a number of artists’ responses to the city.
We haven’t announced the full programme of events at this time [as of at the time the interview was conducted in February 2025 – editor’s note], but we’ll have an opening weekend of events and performances, a midpoint moment when some artists return for further contributions and workshops, and a final weekend where we will deliver a programme of events with a range of cultural partners to be announced later this Spring. These pulse points are loosely themed around the three ways I’m defining “bedrock” – the opening on the city’s foundations haunted by empire; the midpoint on the things that ground us, including family and chosen family; and the end weekend on the geology of the city. We’ll also have a new podcast series featuring artist interviews devised with Dr Vid Simoniti from the University of Liverpool as part of his Art Against the World series; the series will include voices from the city and other contributors from the fields of postcolonial studies, geology, and life writing.
N.L.: And some works will remain permanently in the city. What does it mean for Liverpool? And how do you expect this “open-air museum” to change the relationship between locals and their city?
M.-A.Q.: Liverpool has an incredible array of public art that has been added to over the years by Liverpool Biennial – permanent works commissioned by Liverpool Biennial for the city include Antony Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach, Rudy Loewe’s The Reckoning in the Baltic Triangle, Peter Blake’s Everybody Razzle Dazzle ferry and Ugo Rondinone’s Liverpool Mountain on the city’s iconic waterfront. I’m really delighted to contribute new temporary public artworks with a strong focus on women artists for LB2025. We’ll announce soon who they are and which aspects of the city they’re responding to and augmenting.
I can also see how the city might be understood as an open-air museum, as you say, but it feels like something even more dynamic, complex, and ever-changing. It’s such an honour to be involved in leaving works behind that will resonate in a local context through fostering collaborations between participating artists, local communities, and organisations. I should also say, I’m local too – I live in the city – so planning LB2025 involved walking routes that I also take daily; I’m very aware that public artworks are both sought out and encountered incidentally. At least two of my contributions to the city will have seating so they offer the opportunity to rest.
For this year’s festival, we’ll also be using “found” venues, which are all part of the city’s complex civic fabric, and placing artworks in unexpected places for visitors to encounter as they walk around and between each exhibition. Overall, I want whatever we do to add to, but not interrupt, the flow of city life.
N.L.: Speaking of participating artists. How did you select them – which criteria did you follow, or maybe what were you searching for in their practices?
M.-A.Q.: I started my research as soon as I was appointed, and that was wide-ranging as an approach – online and in-person studio visits, recommendations from UK and international curatorial peers, from cultural agencies and embassies, from residency programmes including Gasworks, London, and from our venue partners and, most importantly, other artists. I went in person to Athens, Amsterdam, Dublin, and Quebec, amongst other visits. I’m really grateful to everyone who supported those conversations and to the artists I met. In addition, each Liverpool Biennial also borrows from the Tate Collection, so it was an exciting process to delve into their database, selecting Christine Sun Kim, Fred Wilson, Mounira Al Solh, and Sheila Hicks.
When researching, I was always thinking about the context of Liverpool; its colonial past, its deep history of immigration and emigration, the city in the present, as well as the framework of BEDROCK. I wanted to work with artists who would have a personal resonance with the city, to find artists who hadn’t shown here before but would also find being part of LB2025 productive for their own practice. Then, I was thinking about dynamic and thoughtful ways to animate sites and spaces for audiences. There’s no one criteria – lots of factors informed the decision to make an invitation to LB2025, and I’m really thankful to the participating artists for taking this leap of faith.
I’m mainly working with artists for the first time, but have returned to work with two artists I’d previously worked with earlier in my career; Elizabeth Price and Cevdet Erek who I knew would resonate with the city. I also wanted a key commission that would reflect something of the contemporary life of the city and was delighted to include Amber Akaunu, who grew up here in the 2000s. And then to bring entirely new voices in, when possible, artists visit the city to do their own research and meet other artists. Finding resonances between their own practices, as well as with the city, has been a highlight of this process.
“When researching, I was always thinking about the context of Liverpool; its colonial past, its deep history of immigration and emigration, the city in the present, as well as the framework of BEDROCK.”
— Marie-Anne McQuay
N.L.: So, what would you say about what this curatorship in Liverpool represents for your career?
M.-A.Q.: I’ve previously curated at the Venice Biennale (Wales in Venice 2019 / Sean Edwards solo presentation) and have attended biennials across my career, so it feels like a very significant moment to curate my first full biennial here in Liverpool. I also worked at Bluecoat, Liverpool for 7 years as Head of Programme, where I was able to bring the work of artists based across the UK and internationally to the city. This is something I can continue through BEDROCK, and it’s such a huge honour to curate a biennial in the city where you live – the responsibility of that really stays with me; it matters on a personal as well as professional level. I hope other guest opportunities will follow, but mainly, I’m very excited to reveal what the artists have been working on in June. That’s definitely what’s mostly on my mind right now.
Liverpool Biennial 2025
June 7 – September 14, 2025
Liverpool, United Kingdom
