‘Beautiful World, Where Are You?’ The Tenth Liverpool Biennial, July 14–October 28 2018

‘Beautiful world, where are you?’ – this question provides the title and prompt for the tenth edition of Liverpool’s Biennial and is reflected in the way in which the international array of over forty artists from twenty-two countries on show throughout the city are caught between art as a song of sorrow and lament for lost ideals or a redemptive and socially useful aesthetic form. On one hand, elegy: Reeta Sattar’s film Harano Sur, in which many performers each play one of the seven notes of the harmonium, a traditional musical instrument now under threat from Islamic law in Bangladesh, or Abbas Akhavan’s monumental soil sculpture of the fragment of an ancient Assyrian sculpture, destroyed by ISIS. On the other, the hopeful glimmers of educational and environmental improvement: the social ‘gift’ of new seats surrounding the Catholic cathedral, designed by schoolchildren under the tutelage of Ryan Gander – forms that also offered other unwanted uses by skateboarders and BMX riders – or the uplifting idealism of Mohammed Bourouissa’s Resiliance Garden, in partnership with Liverpool’s Kingsley Community school, modelled on one planted for therapy in Algeria by a patient of the psychoanalyst and writer, Frantz Fanon. For this Biennial the director Sally Tallant has invited Kitty Scott (Carol and Morton Rapp Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario) to co-curate. Film dominates, as does the familiar shopping list of worthy issues contemporary artists are said to be now addressing, identified by Tallant in interview with Scott as ‘inequality, conservation, extinction, resource extraction, Indigeneity [sic] and postcolonialism’. The colonial legacy of Liverpool is drawn out in some of the city’s cultural treasures that we are invited to reflect upon through the Biennial’s adjunct curatorial selections made from the civic collections and architecture, forming part of ‘Worlds within Worlds’. The Biennial presents a new artistic commission, the first in the UK, for the nonagenarian film-maker Agnès Varda. Her short three-channel video projection at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) – combining bursts of sound with slowed-down fragments of two of her past films and including footage shot unawares when she left her camera running, showing the lens cover dancing over the ground – seems motivated by depleting film of meaning and legibility, of film reduced to aesthetic form. Varda’s move to art is not without its problems and runs against the domination of the Biennial by an overdetermined content-driven practice. Small paintings by Francis Alÿs are dependent on the frisson between the identification of the locations in which they were purportedly made and the way they are made. These unassuming postcard-size paintings, produced