The Royal Mail Sorting Office is a cavernous building near Liverpool city centre that buzzed with the sound of busy postal workers until it was shut in 2011.
But it will spring back to life this month as art lovers flock to what will become one of the main exhibition spaces of the 2012 Liverpool Biennial.
The seventh Liverpool Biennial is also occupying part of the Cunard Building, one of the city’s iconic Three Graces on the waterfront. Like the sorting office, the former headquarters and main passenger terminal for the Cunard shipping company is a building that the public don’t ordinarily have access to.
Contemporary visual arts festivals and biennials often hold shows in unusual buildings and spaces, but some feel this needs to be thought about more carefully to succeed.
“It has become a bit of a cliché to take over your average warehouse down a side street,” says Andrew Nairne, the director of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, who has visited biennials all over the world, including Liverpool’s. “But it becomes more interesting if an artist responds to a particular historical building.
“I would like so see biennials be even more committed to the histories and stories of the places in which they are located,” Nairne continues. “The biennials that do that tend to be the more interesting ones – the ones that search for the same damp warehouse don’t have the same resonance about them.”
All-round appeal
The Liverpool Biennial has a strong tradition of getting out and engaging with the city and its new director, Sally Tallant, who joined from London’s Serpentine Gallery late last year, is keen for this to continue.
She says she wants an event that is embedded within the community but also produces world-class art for its audiences.
Engaging with local and regional concerns while also appealing to the international art world is among the challenges of running a biennial, as is the two-year timeframe.
One of Tallant’s aims is to make the biennial productive all year round. She points to Dutch artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, who has been working on a biennial project in the Anfield area of the city.
The 2Up 2Down initiative involves local residents of all ages in a project to develop places and spaces for their neighbourhood in the empty terrace housing and vacant ground around Liverpool Football Club’s stadium.
“Biennials are very good at profiling the best international practice at any given time but not all of those projects can engage with the city in an in-depth way, as Jeanne has been doing,” says Tallant.
“Those [type of] projects take many years to evolve, so what we are trying to do is build a structure that allows a range of projects to unfold through a range of different strategies that add up to more than the sum of their parts.”
In some ways, creating an ongoing programme of activity is made easier in Liverpool as the biennial has a strong relationship with arts organisations in the city that operate all year round such as Tate Liverpool, Fact, the Bluecoat, National Museums Liverpool and the Open Eye Gallery. Much of this spirit of cooperation was forged during Liverpool’s Capital of Culture Year in 2008.
The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, which took place from 20 April to 7 May, also has close links with the visual arts organisations in its city. The festival’s outgoing director, Katrina Brown of the Common Guild, says this is partly because the event, which started in 2005 and has been biennial since 2008, grew out of the city’s arts scene.
Cultural infrastructure
“It is not a top-down curated festival,” says Brown. “It is very much a blend of projects that are conceived and commissioned directly by the festival, but we also have a channel whereby visual arts organisations in the city can bid for funds to deliver more ambitious projects or things that are somewhat different from what they might do day in, day out.”
Brown has worked hard to make sure that the event has a blend of local, national and international artists.
“It is important it’s not either exclusively parachuted-in international artists or just a local showcase: it needs to be both,” says Brown.
“We don’t have quotas, we can’t proscribe that you must work with an international artist or a Glasgow artist. But last time and even more this time it has been very well balanced, just by careful management, prioritising things and knowing what certain organisations are good at.”
Other arts festivals have been set up precisely because of a lack of cultural infrastructure. The most striking example is the arts triennial in Folkestone, a seaside town in the south coast in England.
The event is the flagship project of the Creative Foundation, a charity created by Roger De Haan, the former owner of the Saga Group, which offers services to the over-50s. The charity is based in Folkestone and is leading a cultural renewal of the old town area.
The Folkestone Triennial started in 2008 and the artists involved, such as Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger and Martin Creed, have used public spaces to create their works. The 2014 triennial will be curated by former Liverpool Biennial director Lewis Biggs.
Whether they are helping to create new cultural venues or enhancing existing ones, biennials do seem to be good at attracting new audiences to contemporary art.
Simon Groom is the director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, whose Picasso and Modern British Art show (until 4 November) was part in the Edinburgh Art Festival, which ran throughout August.
Groom says that while there are many different models for visual arts biennials and festivals, what they share is an ability to increase the visibility of art to international audiences and to provide new and interesting ways for people to experience art.
“The whole nature of contemporary art has changed and there are ways of engaging with contemporary art that you would have never considered 10 years ago,” Groom says. “Art does tend to get siloed and you expect to see art in an art gallery, but it is where it spills out that you often get the most interesting encounters.”
The Edinburgh Art Festival has the challenge of running a visual arts event in a place known for the performing arts. It is also in a city full of historical buildings where empty spaces ripe for takeover are few and far between.
But this year’s Promenade Programme is getting works out into the public realm through a series of commissions that will take people on a tour of Edinburgh’s New Town.
“We put on a programme, but it only becomes a festival with the visitors coming,” says Sorcha Carey, the director of Edinburgh Art Festival. “There is something special about how the influx of people changes the city and becomes a kind of alchemy.”
Funding pressures
Attracting new audiences, engaging communities and producing world-class art all sounds very positive, but some are questioning whether biennials are still the best places to see the most interesting art.
There is a feeling that the same international artists appear again and again and that biennials are part of an event-driven culture that is more about tourism than high-quality art.
David Elliott was the artistic director of Ukraine’s first international biennale, which took place in the capital Kiev from 24 May to 31 July. The former director of Modern Art Oxford and the Istanbul Modern also curated the 2010 International Biennale of Sydney.
“I think that the curator has a duty to discover work she or he does not yet know – I really don’t like exhibitions that just regurgitate the curator’s address book,” he says.
Elliott is also concerned that chasing private-sector funding damages biennials.
“In a 30-year period distinguished by almost constant financial reduction in the public funding of the cultural sector, the main effect has been to erode the distinction between public and private, as public bodies chase sponsors at any cost,” Elliott says.
“As a result, public institutions no longer stand up for public values – disinterestedness and meticulous research – those very elements that make them special. Everything becomes corporate.”
Some of these issues surrounding the future of biennials will be thrashed out at a World Biennial Forum being organised by the Biennial Foundation, an international organisation set up to help those involved in biennials to exchange ideas, information and best practice.
The first World Biennial Forum takes place in October and coincides with the Gwangju Biennale, which is being held in South Korea from 7 September to 11 November. There are more than 100 biennial organisations operating worldwide.
Marieke van Hal, the director of the Biennial Foundation, argues that it is difficult to generalise about biennials as there are so many different formats and they operate in so many different ways.
“The beauty of biennials is their diversity in terms of the institutions that organise them, the skills they have and the ways that they are funded,” she says. “It is a very flexible exhibition format that can be arranged in lots of different ways.”
Despite the funding problems that many biennials face, their flexibility and ability to react quickly to changing trends should make them fairly resilient.
Organisers of such events are already used to developing partnerships, and many are familiar with working with other artforms such as dance and theatre.
The Manchester International Festival, a biennial event that will be held again in July 2013, has shown how a cross-disciplinary programme can work.
For Tallant, UK and international partnerships, as well as working with other artforms are among the ways in which she hopes to take the Liverpool Biennial forward.
“Of course there is a need to reinvent the format, but you can say that about anything,” Tallant says.
“I think people very easily say everyone is bored with biennales, but it is a platform – if you do interesting things with it, it is an interesting platform, if you don’t, it’s a redundant platform, and you might as well not bother.”
The seventh Liverpool Biennial (15 September–25 November) begins this month with a new director, Sally Tallant, the former head of programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery, who replaced Lewis Biggs, who is to curate the 2014 Folkestone Triennial.
Among the new venues that Tallant has to play with are a cavernous former postal sorting office near Lime Street Station and the waterfront Cunard Building.
Tallant wants to “rethink how the biennial is perceived and also positioned” and one of the first things she has done is brand the event as “The UK Biennial of Contemporary Art”.
It always has been the UK’s major international art biennial, but Tallant wants to get this message across more strongly.
She also wants to communicate better the organisation’s achievements. Since 1999 it has commissioned more than 200 artworks and has worked with nearly 180 artists from more than 70 countries. The event attracted over 600,000 visitors when it was held in 2010 and contributed £27m to Liverpool’s economy.
Tallant has also has tried to develop a more integrated approach to programming.
“The biennial lasts 10 weeks, and it is an exhibition across 20 sites, but it is also across a number of days so the temporality and pace of the programming is very important,” says Tallant, who has worked with various partners to create a series of mini-festivals on the 10 weekends that the event covers. There is also an education programme, a family programme and tours.
Highlights of the biennial include the Sky Arts Ignition Series, a partnership with Tate Liverpool, that will present a public commission by US artist Doug Aitken. The work will be installed at the city’s Albert Dock in a temporary structure designed by British architect David Adjaye.
Rhys Chatham, renowned for his large-scale performance works, will present a concert as part of the opening weekend. And Argentinean artist Jorge Macchi is working on a huge shipping container that will be wedged precariously in a public location in the city.
The Unexpected Guest, which is being curated by Lorenzo Fusi, will show works by more than 60 artists across the city. City States will bring together more than 60 artists from seven countries and will be held at the former Royal Mail Sorting Office.
But it will spring back to life this month as art lovers flock to what will become one of the main exhibition spaces of the 2012 Liverpool Biennial.
The seventh Liverpool Biennial is also occupying part of the Cunard Building, one of the city’s iconic Three Graces on the waterfront. Like the sorting office, the former headquarters and main passenger terminal for the Cunard shipping company is a building that the public don’t ordinarily have access to.
Contemporary visual arts festivals and biennials often hold shows in unusual buildings and spaces, but some feel this needs to be thought about more carefully to succeed.
“It has become a bit of a cliché to take over your average warehouse down a side street,” says Andrew Nairne, the director of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, who has visited biennials all over the world, including Liverpool’s. “But it becomes more interesting if an artist responds to a particular historical building.
“I would like so see biennials be even more committed to the histories and stories of the places in which they are located,” Nairne continues. “The biennials that do that tend to be the more interesting ones – the ones that search for the same damp warehouse don’t have the same resonance about them.”
All-round appeal
The Liverpool Biennial has a strong tradition of getting out and engaging with the city and its new director, Sally Tallant, who joined from London’s Serpentine Gallery late last year, is keen for this to continue.
She says she wants an event that is embedded within the community but also produces world-class art for its audiences.
Engaging with local and regional concerns while also appealing to the international art world is among the challenges of running a biennial, as is the two-year timeframe.
One of Tallant’s aims is to make the biennial productive all year round. She points to Dutch artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, who has been working on a biennial project in the Anfield area of the city.
The 2Up 2Down initiative involves local residents of all ages in a project to develop places and spaces for their neighbourhood in the empty terrace housing and vacant ground around Liverpool Football Club’s stadium.
“Biennials are very good at profiling the best international practice at any given time but not all of those projects can engage with the city in an in-depth way, as Jeanne has been doing,” says Tallant.
“Those [type of] projects take many years to evolve, so what we are trying to do is build a structure that allows a range of projects to unfold through a range of different strategies that add up to more than the sum of their parts.”
In some ways, creating an ongoing programme of activity is made easier in Liverpool as the biennial has a strong relationship with arts organisations in the city that operate all year round such as Tate Liverpool, Fact, the Bluecoat, National Museums Liverpool and the Open Eye Gallery. Much of this spirit of cooperation was forged during Liverpool’s Capital of Culture Year in 2008.
The Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, which took place from 20 April to 7 May, also has close links with the visual arts organisations in its city. The festival’s outgoing director, Katrina Brown of the Common Guild, says this is partly because the event, which started in 2005 and has been biennial since 2008, grew out of the city’s arts scene.
Cultural infrastructure
“It is not a top-down curated festival,” says Brown. “It is very much a blend of projects that are conceived and commissioned directly by the festival, but we also have a channel whereby visual arts organisations in the city can bid for funds to deliver more ambitious projects or things that are somewhat different from what they might do day in, day out.”
Brown has worked hard to make sure that the event has a blend of local, national and international artists.
“It is important it’s not either exclusively parachuted-in international artists or just a local showcase: it needs to be both,” says Brown.
“We don’t have quotas, we can’t proscribe that you must work with an international artist or a Glasgow artist. But last time and even more this time it has been very well balanced, just by careful management, prioritising things and knowing what certain organisations are good at.”
Other arts festivals have been set up precisely because of a lack of cultural infrastructure. The most striking example is the arts triennial in Folkestone, a seaside town in the south coast in England.
The event is the flagship project of the Creative Foundation, a charity created by Roger De Haan, the former owner of the Saga Group, which offers services to the over-50s. The charity is based in Folkestone and is leading a cultural renewal of the old town area.
The Folkestone Triennial started in 2008 and the artists involved, such as Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger and Martin Creed, have used public spaces to create their works. The 2014 triennial will be curated by former Liverpool Biennial director Lewis Biggs.
Whether they are helping to create new cultural venues or enhancing existing ones, biennials do seem to be good at attracting new audiences to contemporary art.
Simon Groom is the director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, whose Picasso and Modern British Art show (until 4 November) was part in the Edinburgh Art Festival, which ran throughout August.
Groom says that while there are many different models for visual arts biennials and festivals, what they share is an ability to increase the visibility of art to international audiences and to provide new and interesting ways for people to experience art.
“The whole nature of contemporary art has changed and there are ways of engaging with contemporary art that you would have never considered 10 years ago,” Groom says. “Art does tend to get siloed and you expect to see art in an art gallery, but it is where it spills out that you often get the most interesting encounters.”
The Edinburgh Art Festival has the challenge of running a visual arts event in a place known for the performing arts. It is also in a city full of historical buildings where empty spaces ripe for takeover are few and far between.
But this year’s Promenade Programme is getting works out into the public realm through a series of commissions that will take people on a tour of Edinburgh’s New Town.
“We put on a programme, but it only becomes a festival with the visitors coming,” says Sorcha Carey, the director of Edinburgh Art Festival. “There is something special about how the influx of people changes the city and becomes a kind of alchemy.”
Funding pressures
Attracting new audiences, engaging communities and producing world-class art all sounds very positive, but some are questioning whether biennials are still the best places to see the most interesting art.
There is a feeling that the same international artists appear again and again and that biennials are part of an event-driven culture that is more about tourism than high-quality art.
David Elliott was the artistic director of Ukraine’s first international biennale, which took place in the capital Kiev from 24 May to 31 July. The former director of Modern Art Oxford and the Istanbul Modern also curated the 2010 International Biennale of Sydney.
“I think that the curator has a duty to discover work she or he does not yet know – I really don’t like exhibitions that just regurgitate the curator’s address book,” he says.
Elliott is also concerned that chasing private-sector funding damages biennials.
“In a 30-year period distinguished by almost constant financial reduction in the public funding of the cultural sector, the main effect has been to erode the distinction between public and private, as public bodies chase sponsors at any cost,” Elliott says.
“As a result, public institutions no longer stand up for public values – disinterestedness and meticulous research – those very elements that make them special. Everything becomes corporate.”
Some of these issues surrounding the future of biennials will be thrashed out at a World Biennial Forum being organised by the Biennial Foundation, an international organisation set up to help those involved in biennials to exchange ideas, information and best practice.
The first World Biennial Forum takes place in October and coincides with the Gwangju Biennale, which is being held in South Korea from 7 September to 11 November. There are more than 100 biennial organisations operating worldwide.
Marieke van Hal, the director of the Biennial Foundation, argues that it is difficult to generalise about biennials as there are so many different formats and they operate in so many different ways.
“The beauty of biennials is their diversity in terms of the institutions that organise them, the skills they have and the ways that they are funded,” she says. “It is a very flexible exhibition format that can be arranged in lots of different ways.”
Despite the funding problems that many biennials face, their flexibility and ability to react quickly to changing trends should make them fairly resilient.
Organisers of such events are already used to developing partnerships, and many are familiar with working with other artforms such as dance and theatre.
The Manchester International Festival, a biennial event that will be held again in July 2013, has shown how a cross-disciplinary programme can work.
For Tallant, UK and international partnerships, as well as working with other artforms are among the ways in which she hopes to take the Liverpool Biennial forward.
“Of course there is a need to reinvent the format, but you can say that about anything,” Tallant says.
“I think people very easily say everyone is bored with biennales, but it is a platform – if you do interesting things with it, it is an interesting platform, if you don’t, it’s a redundant platform, and you might as well not bother.”
Masses to see on the Mersey
The seventh Liverpool Biennial (15 September–25 November) begins this month with a new director, Sally Tallant, the former head of programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery, who replaced Lewis Biggs, who is to curate the 2014 Folkestone Triennial.
Among the new venues that Tallant has to play with are a cavernous former postal sorting office near Lime Street Station and the waterfront Cunard Building.
Tallant wants to “rethink how the biennial is perceived and also positioned” and one of the first things she has done is brand the event as “The UK Biennial of Contemporary Art”.
It always has been the UK’s major international art biennial, but Tallant wants to get this message across more strongly.
She also wants to communicate better the organisation’s achievements. Since 1999 it has commissioned more than 200 artworks and has worked with nearly 180 artists from more than 70 countries. The event attracted over 600,000 visitors when it was held in 2010 and contributed £27m to Liverpool’s economy.
Tallant has also has tried to develop a more integrated approach to programming.
“The biennial lasts 10 weeks, and it is an exhibition across 20 sites, but it is also across a number of days so the temporality and pace of the programming is very important,” says Tallant, who has worked with various partners to create a series of mini-festivals on the 10 weekends that the event covers. There is also an education programme, a family programme and tours.
Highlights of the biennial include the Sky Arts Ignition Series, a partnership with Tate Liverpool, that will present a public commission by US artist Doug Aitken. The work will be installed at the city’s Albert Dock in a temporary structure designed by British architect David Adjaye.
Rhys Chatham, renowned for his large-scale performance works, will present a concert as part of the opening weekend. And Argentinean artist Jorge Macchi is working on a huge shipping container that will be wedged precariously in a public location in the city.
The Unexpected Guest, which is being curated by Lorenzo Fusi, will show works by more than 60 artists across the city. City States will bring together more than 60 artists from seven countries and will be held at the former Royal Mail Sorting Office.
