For ten weeks every two years the city of Liverpool is host to an extraordinary range of artworks, projects and a dynamic programme of events. It is the largest international contemporary art festival in the UK. Liverpool Biennial unfolds through a programme of exhibitions and projects that lead to a rediscovery of the city. Newly commissioned and existing artworks and projects are presented in diverse locations, including unusual and unexpected public spaces as well as the city’s galleries, museums and cultural venues. The cultural organisations in Liverpool work together in partnership to create an unparalleled context for the presentation of contemporary art and culture. In this issue involved, thanks to the collaboration of AC / E, two Spanish artists: Dora García y Libia Castro.
"Outside!" is Dora García's multi-part commission for Liverpool Biennial. Made in collaboration with Liverpool-based community TV project ToxtethTV, Peter Aers and the Bluecoat, it allows Liverpool residents to narrate their own story of the City and its undercurrents through a street TV project which features a live talk show element. The live part of the project will take place in the first days of the Biennial, and will be displayed as an installation in the Bluecoat thereafter. "Outside!" extends García's ongoing interest in creating a forum for public debate through the recovery of experimental theatrical and broadcast forms, and the possibilities within them for creating new types of narrative that can often destabilise the realm in which the narrator operates. As part of this strategy, "Outside!" also plays on the relationship between audience and entertainer, challenging the porous nature of these roles and the capacity for the audience to generate its own spectacle.
For the 2012 Biennial, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson will launch their campaign ThE riGHt tO RighT. The campaign is intended to act as a catalyst, provoking discussion about our right to rights: to open debate, to destabilise and question the status quo. Through this campaign, the artists assert that this fundamental right is the first step towards a real and communal socio-political emancipation: above and beyond the multitude of international conventions, declarations, protocols and constitutions that specify and regulate the rights that nation-states and transnational agencies have made available to citizens. This is ultimately a right that precedes the political sphere: it is the first right we have to fight for so as to enable for any subsequent rights to surface.
Dora García
Libia Castro
