Tate Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool

Upstairs, Edgar Calel’s work ‘Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el (The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge)’ (2021) presents stones as sacred sites of ritual adorned with fruit and vegetables placed during a private ritual during the exhibition installation. Exhibited here for the first time since Tate began its 13-year custodianship of the work, the piece exists as an offering to the land and Calel’s ancestors. In the artist’s home, stories from dreams are shared amongst families over breakfast and are understood to foretell the energy for the day or task ahead. For Calel, dreams, art and spirituality are always interconnected and here, they have determined the specific produce which is on offer as thanks. Calel draws on ancestral knowledge from his Mayan Kaqchikel heritage, his work both a celebration of the traditions and spirituality of his community in Guatemala and an act of resistance in its presentation of ancestral practices. The work creates a space to acknowledge, honour, preserve and be in the presence of ancestral indigenous forms of knowledge.

Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales presents several works from her ‘Holograms’ series (2020-2022), alongside a newly commissioned textile work, ‘Contradanza’ (2023). Both explore how fashion photography often copies and extracts from aesthetics and traditional dress of indigenous people and cultures for commercial purposes. In these types of photographs, people are portrayed as subjects with no identity, reduced to their costumes that become detached from their original purpose or meaning through repetitive postures and gestures. Through the photographer’s lens, Andean and other indigenous bodies become exotic commodities for an international market, enabling hierarchies that reproduce the colonial idea of a “civilised us” constructed in opposition to the “indigenous others”. Using the same patterns and symbols, often lost in the background of these staged photographs, she creates new abstract compositions which reclaim the existence, meaning and essence of traditional Andean celebrations. In this way, Rodrigo Gonzales’ work makes sacred what has been commodified.

Francis Offman proposes a meditation on the Rwandan genocide, an intimate reflection on how to convey history’s violent narrative through objects of personal connection. ‘Untitled’ is centred around a Bible belonging to Offman’s mother which accompanied her as she fled the country with her family following the onset of the Rwandan Civil War. The floor is filled with books, each delicately held up by callipers – instruments used by Belgian colonisers to measure the facial features of Rwandan people and classify them into racial groups. This immense violence is juxtaposed against the daily pleasure of drinking coffee – a major export of Rwanda – with repurposed grounds spread on the fabric and covering the books. The dialogue between these objects demonstrates how personal experience is central to collective histories and healing.

Gala Porras-Kim’s work questions the museum storage system, investigating institutional frameworks and the ethics of keeping and caring for objects. In ‘Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing’ (2022 – ongoing), Porras-Kim propagates mould spores from the British Museum’s collection storage, liberating and regrowing microscopic parts of the exhibits and artefacts. The work is a living organism. The mould spores will grow and spread over the course of the exhibition, inverting traditional concerns within conservation which aim to prevent and contain growth.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s ‘Disease Thrower’ series (2019) are autobiographical constructions which are at once sculptures, shrines, wearable headdresses, and healing instruments, reflecting on the artist’s own experiences as an undocumented migrant and cancer survivor. Elements of the work are crafted from objects collected during Maravilla’s retracing of his childhood migration route made alone to the USA at the age of 8 to escape the civil war in El Salvador, interwoven with items from the spiritual and shamanic practices the artist experienced after his diagnosis with colon cancer in his mid-30s. The works consider ancient and contemporary methods of healing the body and spirit from the traumas of displacement. The artist works with healers of all types to activate the works during sound ceremonies which include gongs, singing, flutes, harmonicas and many other types of sound instruments.

In the creation of her work, Isa do Rosário is led by spiritual conversations with Orixás (pronounced ‘oh-ri-shas’) and those who lost their lives during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. According to Candomblé, an African religion that developed in Brazil during the 19th century, Orixás are believed to be deified ancestors who represent forces of nature. These deities can be communicated with directly and offer guidance, protection, prosperity and health. The large and intricate textile work exhibited here emerges directly from this connection and communication, creating a meditation space for remembering, mourning and ascension.

Lubaina Himid’s work, ‘Between the Two my Heart is Balanced’ (1991), is a re-imagining of French artist James Tissot’s painting ‘Portsmouth Dockyard’ (c.1877). Himid’s work subverts the artistic canon, centralising two Black female figures and using painting as a place to imagine something other than pain. In Tissot’s work, a white British soldier is seated in a boat between two white women. Meanwhile, Himid’s piece replaces the soldier with a stack of coloured maps which the women are tearing apart. This action indicates a rejection of traditional forms of knowledge, navigation and rules created and controlled by white men. Himid’s contribution to the British Black arts movement has been pivotal since the 1980s, carving out space for the expression and recognition of Black experience and women’s creativity. In her work ‘Act One, No Maps’ (1992), Himid further explores the overlooked and invisible aspects of history and contemporary life through positioning Black women as protagonists. The painting depicts two Black women seated at the opera, gazing out at a seascape from their balcony seats. Inspired by the Impressionist works of Auguste Renoir and Mary Cassatt, Himid was drawn to create these pieces as a reclaiming of space after the realisation that she could not recall ever seeing a painting with two Black female protagonists.

Nolan Oswald Dennis’ work ‘No conciliation is possible (working diagram)’ (2018 – ongoing) is next in their series of installations consisting of map-like wall diagrams and a shifting selection of drawings and objects which amplify the diagrams’ contents. Dennis explores the hidden structures that determine the limits of our social and political imagination. Within the diagram, the meanings of terms such as ‘welcomed and unwelcomed’, ‘apology’, ‘land’, ‘country’, ‘home’, ‘dream’ ‘ancestor’, ‘inheritance’ and ‘healing’ are complicated by their shared and unshared meanings. Meanwhile, the use of terms like ‘reconciliation’, ‘reparations’, ‘repatriation’, ‘regeneration’, ‘compensation’ and ‘justice’ can be seen as a condition and limitation of imagining a world beyond our reality. The artist is concerned with a ‘Black consciousness of space’, questioning the politics of space and time. In particular, the work examines how decolonisation, colonial compensation and conciliation exist throughout history, in the present and into the future.

In ‘Mumbo Jumbo and The Committee’ (2022), Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum explores the conflicting demands faced by the artist in pursuit of home and wholeness – the intrinsic expectations of family and community, with the demands and limitations imposed by whiteness. Through drawing, animation and bespoke furnishing inspired by Victorian design aesthetics, Sunstrum looks at how our cultural identities are often tied to our environments, to the expectations of others and imposing systems of class and race inequality.

In her artistic practice, Shannon Alonzo aims to create a connection, or draw a thread, between past and present. She etches, stitches, draws and moulds as a way of making the rich archive of the Caribbean community more tangible. She attempts to counteract years of historical erasure and remnants of colonial legacy which often obscures progress towards collective belonging and a deeper understanding of the self for Caribbean people. Created in response to an article on the ‘postcolonial diet’ in the Caribbean, ‘Lowest Hanging Fruit’ (2018) questions how our everyday choices are often informed by our history. The layers of the garment represent periods of time, with the subject seen lifting the upper layer – which represents the present – in order to reveal the past. ‘Washerwoman’ (2018) is inspired by an unnamed woman featured in a photograph taken by J.W. Cleary in Jamaica around 1890. It is the product of Alonzo’s attempt to get to know her ancestors through the work of her own hands, which silently move alongside theirs across time.