Biennial Visitors Centre

When 18.9.2010 - 28.11.2010
Times daily 10.00–18.00
Where 52 Renshaw Street, former Rapid Hardware buildings
Wheelchair Acesss Yes

As well as housing the visitor centre, the former Rapid Hardware spaces are home to a number of public realm projects as well as The Human Stain and Re:thinking Trade.

The Human Stain | Curated by Lorenzo Fusi

Artists Oren Eliav, Tim Eitel, Y.Z. Kami, Csaba Kis Róka, Edi Hila, Aime Mpane, Markus Schinwald and Zbynek Sedlecky

This part of ‘Touched’ is a visual and emotional journey that progresses through the inner labyrinths of the Self. We proceed through it by degrees, penetrating the different layers that separate the notion of collectivity from the Freudian Id - the rioting sphere of the unexpressed or repressed Self. These degrees are envisioned as short stories to be read either as a continuous narrative or separately. Each step of this journey towards the intimacy of the Self is titled after a book that somehow suggests an atmosphere or state of mind. The sequence unfolds as follows:

The Cement Garden (Zbynek Sedlecky)
Confessions of a Public Speaker (Oren Eliav)
One, No one and One Hundred Thousand (Aime Mpane, Y. Z. Kami)
The Anatomy of Melancholy (Edi Hila)
The Seed of Lost Souls (Tim Eitel)
Naked Lunch (Csaba Kis Róka, Markus Schinwald)

Re:Thinking Trade | Curated by Lorenzo Fusi

Artists Minerva Cuevas, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, Daniel Knorr, Meschac Gaba, Karmelo Bermejo, Freee and Lee Mingwei.

Since the social activism of the 1960s, many artists have taken a critical stance towards both capitalism and the dominant consumerism of ‘advanced’ societies. Bypassing, resisting, or intervening in the mechanisms of late capitalism, they have sought to make ‘socially relevant’ art that works outside or against the constraints of capitalism and consumerism, returning producer and consumer to a more human relationship.
Re:Thinking Trade proposes to touch the city through ‘art re-appropriation’. Disused retail spaces will be revived as temporary venues for art-projects. Newly conceived artworks (and some existing ones not previously presented in the UK) will offer the viewer, or ‘customer’, a wide range of experiences and a variety of alternative ways to trade their time and attention in exchange for a benefit. At times the benefit will be a tangible product. More often it will be a ‘gift’ from the artist, more ethereal and impalpable: an intellectual or emotional device to touch the recipient’s general wellbeing or self-perception.

Catedra Arte de Conducta | Curated by Lorenzo Fusi

Founded by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera in 2002, Catedra Arte de Conducta was an informal institution dedicated to producing a new generation of Cuban artists. Concentrating on live art, the Catedra used the city and its social realities as its creative material. The school is now closed: its inclusion in ‘Touched’ will represent the last and conclusive chapter in its history.

Art touches a city most effectively when a personal change (in response to an artwork) is collectively experienced. If this change in self-awareness empowers people to take action and responsibility for their lives and their environment, art has touched the city in its complexity. To make something that is at once political and poetic remains very difficult indeed. We hope that in Liverpool the Catedra will provide a range of responses to this challenge, and also show how the notion of embodiment can shift into that of emplacement to introduce art, people and place to each other effectively.

The Catedra Arte de Conducta will investigate two themes: the utopian city / ideal society; and the legacy of American performance artist Allan Kaprow, through the reinterpretation of one of his seminal works. The project will be a blank canvas at the time of the opening, unrolling through the exhibition period. Gradually, different actions by the twenty artists involved will sediment and accumulate, taking the shape of a group show in progress. Polyphonic, inclusive, self-reflective, analytical and critical, experimental, engaging, stimulating, anti-monumental, fluid: these are some of the words to define this idea. The guiding principle is not to provide a preset response, standing there for all to admire, but to show the processes and intimate motivations behind making and thinking.

52 Renshaw Street, L1 4PN

0845 220 2800

www.biennial.com

Free Entry