At the Liverpool Biennial 2025, everything starts underground

Liverpool Biennial 2025 is an exhibition you experience with your feet. Walking is the medium. Curated by Marie-Anne McQuay, who has spent over a decade embedded in Liverpool’s cultural fabric, the show spreads across 18 venues – from the city’s two soaring cathedrals to shopfronts to pavements and civic buildings. There’s no central hub. You follow the footnotes of the city.

Titled Bedrock, this year’s edition explores the stuff that lies beneath the city – literally, metaphorically and historically. McQuay grounds the show in three intersecting ideas: the sandstone foundation under Liverpool; the city’s legacy as a port of empire and migration; and the emotional structures – care, kinship, resistance – that has become a common identifier of the city. “Foundations are never neutral,” she notes. “They are carried, resisted, excavated and rebuilt.”

One of the standout works is Amber Akaunu’s short film Dear Othermother, on view at Bluecoat. It’s an ode to Toxteth, one of the UK’s oldest Black communities, and to the idea of chosen family. Gentle, poetic and fierce too, the film combines interviews, archival footage and dreamlike narration. It feels like reading someone’s hidden love letter. 

At The Black-E in Chinatown, Elizabeth Price presents a multilayered video essay that investigates Catholic Modernist architecture in post-war Britain. With her signature staccato editing and lyrical voiceovers, Price explores how immigrant Catholic stories, particularly in Liverpool, are embedded in spaces that have been built to be sacred – sites of faith in strange new ground.

Migration also threads through works at Liverpool Cathedral. Maria Loizidou’s delicate stitched birds hang like suspended breaths, symbolising the fragility and strength of movement. Nearby, Ana Navas reworks historical embroidery into glowing glass mosaics, honouring how knowledge is passed hand-to-hand.

Some of the Biennial’s most compelling moments come through its material investigations. At FACT Liverpool, Linda Lamignan’s three-channel film charts the economic entanglement between Liverpool and Nigeria through oil and palm production. With saturated visuals and ambient sound, the work explores how natural resources are both mined and mythologised.

Located in a public library across the city, the theme of excavation continues; Dawit L. Petros digs into maritime archives to remap a British-led Nile expedition from the 1880s, revealing how empire shaped the language we commonly use today.

What holds Bedrock together is movement. You experience the exhibition by drifting – through streets and history. Writer Jeff Young, whose memoir Ghost Town features in the Biennial catalogue, remembers how his mother taught him to love Liverpool by walking it. “It was a living thing that needed our protection and love,” he writes.

The idea of stone as memory runs through the show. Earth scientist Dr. Anjana Khatwa explains how Liverpool’s red and yellow sandstone – formed 250 million years ago – acts as a geological archive. “Rocks are story keepers of time,” she says, noting how they continue to hold the scars of colonialism and capitalism.

Miles Greenwood, curator at the International Slavery Museum, expands this connection. In his contribution to the catalogue, he describes Liverpool’s docks as artificial ground, built on the detritus of empire—tobacco pipes, sugar moulds, glass beads. “I wonder whether my ancestor knew that the ropes he was making were to be used aboard ships that carried so many into death and enslavement,” he writes. 

This idea – the fragmentation of history and its reassembly through art—could have been introduced earlier. For it connects the Biennial’s thematic currents. Bedrock leans into Liverpool’s past, but also invites artists to plant new foundations. McQuay has created space for artists to bring their own bedrocks—their personal, cultural, and ancestral truths—into dialogue with this almost fascinating, creative contemporary, troubled but always compelling city – one for whom the ideas of community, solidarity and commonality, a phrase so often abused, means something real.

Before leaving, I had a drink by the edge of the Mersey, shortly after reading Ursula K. Le Guin in the Biennial catalogue: “Down on the bedrock, things are as they have to be. It’s only everywhere above the bedrock that nothing has to be the way it is.”

Sandstone, like memory, erodes without care. Bedrock doesn’t offer easy solutions. It offers a way to see Liverpool not just as a place, but as a process – layered, contested, and open to being reshaped once again.