.....Design my world.....: Liverpool Bienial

For ten weeks every two years the city of Liverpool is host to an extraordinary range of artworks, projects and a dynamic programme of events. It is the largest international contemporary art festival in the UK.

Liverpool Biennial unfolds through a programme of exhibitions and projects that lead to a rediscovery of the city. Newly commissioned and existing artworks and projects are presented in diverse locations, including unusual and unexpected public spaces as well as the city’s galleries, museums and cultural venues. …

This yeas ''unexpected guest'' exhibitions:

Dan Graham’s work primarily focuses on the notion of time, spectatorship and the phenomenology of viewing, questioning the psychological effects of architecture on the spectator. Graham has deployed a variety of media in order to pursue his investigations, ultimately questioning Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle”: a society obsessed with the media, often mimicking the same interpersonal dynamics that can be found in a TV reality show.

Graham’s 2-Way Mirror Cylinder Bisected By Perforated Stainless Steel, 2011-2012, is one of the latest outdoor pavilions designed by the artist. These architectural structures frequently play with the viewers’ perception and understanding of both inner and outer space. The design of the pavilions, and the two-way mirrors within them, create unexpected reflections and explore the voyeuristic act of simultaneously watching oneself and being able to watch others. They also question how we move and operate in the public sphere: a dimension that both alienates and seduces us.

Kolding seeks inspiration in modernist architecture, city-planning strategies and its associated imagery. Raised in the suburbs of Copenhagen, his relation to the modernist legacy is ambivalent, oscillating between affection and criticality.

The artist is also influenced by city life and pop-cultural sources such as music, football and underground cultural movements. The resulting mix of images is collaged and reconfigured by the artist into posters, maquettes or large billboards. His references are re-worked to cause a shift in meaning and a challenge to how the history of each may be understood in relation to the other.

Kolding interrogates the notion of ‘local identity’, by challenging collective imagery and popular rituals, and the way these interplay with the city.
In Liverpool, the artist extends his research to the notion of hospitality, bringing to the fore the tension and antagonism that characterise the relation between the host and the guest.

Panayiotou’s work investigates the construction of collective narratives, with a particular attention to the intersections that link history and place-making. Popular events such as parades, dance marathons and fireworks displays are interrogated by the artist, who questions their ‘innocence’ and unveils the occult driving forces behind these cathartic initiatives. Panayiotou analyses the rhetoric of the images, their subtext and oblique meaning.

Rosenkranz manipulates objects and images of contemporary culture in order to activate their contingent evolutionary history. Spandex fabric, canvas, mops, nylon fabrics and refilled Evian water bottles are imprinted, stretched and distorted to produce new, unstable realities. Objects become physical beings with bodily traces of flesh and touch.

The artist’s sculpture series Bow Human will be presented throughout the spaces of the Cunard Building. Ghostly, anthropomorphic presences appear to shelter under emergency blankets hunched as though seeking cover indicating the frailty of the human species. Gold or Silver becoming highly symbolic to an apocalypse of fire or ice.

An Offensive Object in the Least Offensive Way is a new commission for the 2012 Biennial, composed by three pieces. The starting point was an exchange between the artist and a neighbour in São Paulo who had a statue of a macaw decorating her front yard.

This sculpture has been shipped across the Atlantic to ‘re-encounter’ a similar macaw depicted in a poster from the early XXth century advertising a voyage to Brazil, which the artist had found at the Liverpool’s Maritime Museum.

Blueprints extends the narrative, by masking the waterfront view from the Cunard building’s window with a paper stand-in for the sea, an ideal blue: calling to mind the necessary fictions within the contexts that the work inhabits.

By the simple gesture of amplifying the sound of a Dia projector, Heaven Falls reinforces the meaning of the objects represented in the slides: a collection of machetes from the American continent.
An object that has been traveling in time assuming different socio-political and symbolic meanings. An offensive object in the least and most offensive ways.