The 2023 Liverpool Biennial and the African Artists to Look Forward to

The theme for the 2023 Liverpool Biennial is ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’. The Liverpool Biennial festival will take place from the 10th of June until the 17th of September, 2023.

‘uMoya’ means spirit, breath, air, climate and wind in the isiZulu language. Curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa, the festival will focus on addressing the history and temperament of the city of Liverpool. It is a call for ancestral and indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing.

‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’ explores the ways in which people and objects have the potential to manifest power as they move across the world while acknowledging the continued losses of the past. It draws a line from the ongoing catastrophes caused by colonialism towards an insistence on being truly alive.

uMoya eases the way for breathing to be a passage for the mourning, the ancestral, the spiritual and the intellectual, enabling a move towards emancipation.

Khanyisile Mbongwa, curator of the Liverpool Biennial 2023, said:

“Wind often represents the fleeting and transient, the elusive and intangible, but I remember my first moment standing at the docks in Liverpool and feeling the wind in my bones. The same wind that made Liverpool the epicentre for the trade of enslaved people and a city that built itself through each ‘merchant’ ship. And I wondered, how can this wind redraw the lines of cartography as pathways for a reckoning to occur? How can it gesture towards healing through implementing systems of care that would allow for a sacred return? A return to self that aligns the celestial and ancestral, a return where one is not denied access to themselves, a return where all that is lost or stolen is acknowledged, remembered, accounted for, ignited and returned”

Khanyisile Mbongwa is who engages with her curatorial practice as Curing & Care, using the creative to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, joy and play.

The Liverpool Biennial is the largest free festival of contemporary visual art in the UK For over two decades, the Biennial has transformed the city through art by taking over historic buildings, unexpected venues, and art galleries. Over the course of the festival, there will be a dynamic schedule of free exhibitions, performances, films, community and learning activities, and fringe events in Liverpool. In collaboration with the city’s premier art institutions, the Biennial program is presented in public spaces, and historic places, and, including the Bluecoat, FACT Liverpool, National Museums Liverpool, Open Eye Gallery, Tate Liverpool, and Victoria Gallery & Museum.

More than 30 international artists and collectives have been invited to participate in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial. Here is a list of some of the African artists to look forward to: