Victoria Gallery and Museum: Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Victoria Gallery and Museum

Through these almost spiritual works, the artists invite us to engage with archives and collective memories. They ask us to contemplate the various ways in which our histories, and the wisdom of our ancestors, live on to impact our position within, and understanding of, the world.

Antonio Obá’s ‘Jardim’ (2022), meaning Garden in Portuguese, is a large-scale installation consisting of hundreds of brass bells. The interactive installation invites visitors to follow a path through the work, encouraging active participation through the ringing of the bells. The immersive environment simulates a hideout – the bells act as bait, calling us to touch them. By completing this irresistible action, we sound the alarm and reveal our presence and location. In this scenario, we become both the hunter and the hunted. Obá draws on his research of hunting environments to present this ambiguous situation that is simultaneously an invitation and a trap.

Charmaine Watkiss’ work forms what she calls ‘memory stories’, visual representations of her research into the African Caribbean diaspora mapped onto life-sized figures. The artist’s work traces African ancestral traditions which survived the Transatlantic crossing; the stories, rituals, and customs which have become a part of Caribbean culture. ‘Witness’ (2023) depicts two deities who share tales of courage in the face of adversity. The illustrated figures are symbols of collection and reflection, representing the unheard voices and stories which survived the Middle Passage. The work invites us to contemplate, reflect and gather our energy for the journey towards healing.

Gala Porras-Kim’s intricate drawings, ‘Future Spaces Replicate Earlier Spaces’ (2023), imagine objects created from ancient vessels, combined to create new forms and functions. A drawing of shells, once used as ritual wind instruments, questions the sounds they would have made individually – a sound that recalls an earlier space, but now becomes a collective sound. A second drawing depicts empty moulds from an ancient factory. We see negative spaces in place of objects which are no longer present, with functions that are no longer available, but which hold the potential to be reimagined and remade. Porras-Kim explores the difficulty of remembering, imagining and recreating specific sounds and acoustics from history, over time and across space. She examines the possibility of recovering or reproducing objects to help us understand how people in the past created and experienced physical and sonic spaces; exploring how we might remember and archive sonically, as well as visually.