Haul away: Liverpool’s irregular currents

Abstract

Bryan Biggs is the artistic director of Bluecoat, Liverpool’s centre for the contemporary arts, where since the 1980s he has curated numerous exhibitions and events at the intersection of the contemporary visual arts, performance, literature and music. In the following text, he explores the particular position and history of Liverpool through the prism of its late twentiethand early twenty-first-century artistic imaginaries. Between the memories of the slave trade and a deindustrialization process that engulfed the port’s former economic prosperity, an estranged hinterland and an unbound river, artists in Liverpool constructed an alternate poetic space in the late twentieth century. Biggs sees these as so many paths through which to articulate an alternative relation to the world beyond, and within. In being tuned to alternate frequencies as they rise from the unknown self as much as the familiar outsider, Liverpool maritime poetics suggest a dif ferent mode of envisioning our interconnected presents