
Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Cotton Exchange
10 June – 17 September 2023
Exhibition is open weekly on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday & Sunday. Check venue opening times for further information.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Liverpool emerged as the world’s largest cotton market, holding the largest single stock of cotton in the world. It was a period in the city’s history when economic prosperity depended upon enforced movement of people, enslavement, trade and labour. This former Cotton Exchange, opened in 1907, is explicitly and integrally tied to this moment in the city’s economic and societal history.
The artists at Cotton Exchange explore resistance, indigenous knowledge and ancestral healing.
Lungiswa Gqunta is interested in histories of displacement and how colonialism, slavery and Apartheid shape and inform displacement. Her work is fractured with the cracks that rupture the underlying structure of South African society. Rather than build upon this unsteady terrain, Gqunta pieces together the fragments of her lived experiences – those of her community’s collective memories – and distils them into their most essential materials, reconstructing the socio-political landscape. Here, the parameters of secure spaces are reconsidered in the form of her sculpture ‘Sleeping Pools – Brewing’ (2023), an illuminated bedframe filled with a petrol-like substance. Gqunta questions what it means to rest in the tenuous divide that separates public and private domains in South Africa, subsequently creating a ‘third space’ where the luxury of a suburb and the perceived threat of a township coincide. The significance of Gqunta’s use of petrol lies in the sense of discomfort it creates, pervasive and unsettling. By accompanying this symbolic representation of a suburban swimming pool with the presence of political unrest, Gqunta highlights structural inequity and poses an imminent threat to privileged entitlement.
Shannon Alonzo’s site-specific mural of charcoal and paint, entitled ‘Mangroves’ (2023), explores the Caribbean Carnival’s relationship to space: claimed and embodied, geographic and ideological. Mangroves are an enmeshed root system living on the fringes of land and sea in coastal, tropical climates. Referencing the entangled forms of mangroves, the motif refers to the Carnival’s historic provision of a place of refuge and stability for marginalised people. Carnival celebrations exist globally to resist racial injustice and institutionalised oppression, offering a space for people of the Caribbean diaspora to assert their right to joy, self-articulation, agency, and ancestral legacy. Alonzo’s ritual of erasing and redrawing the mural part way through the exhibition is an offering to catalyse healing and a restoration of balance.
In ‘Songs to Earth, Songs to Seeds’ (2022) Sepideh Rahaa portrays the often invisible and inaccessible process of rice cultivation in the paddy lands of Mazandaran, Northern Iran. The almost year-long process is an intergenerational tradition, with knowledge passed down for nearly a century through the artist’s family. Rahaa centres the role of women’s labour, presenting the traditional songs sung by Iranian women during the cultivation and harvest seasons. These songs are passed down between generations of women and contain stories of their daily struggles in Mazani (an indigenous language from Northern Iran). The work invites us to consider the complexity and invisibility of rice cultivation in a contemporary, global context. The crop is both a container for indigenous forms of knowledge and, as a global food staple, is enmeshed within cycles of consumption, neo-colonial food politics and environmental injustice.