Liverpool Biennial 2016

APT artist Celine Condorelli is participating the "Liverpool Biennial 2016".

Liverpool Biennial 2016 will unfold through the landscape of the city. It is organised as a story narrated in several episodes: fictional worlds sited in galleries, museums, pubs, unused spaces, stations, hotels, parking lots, shops and supermarkets. For the first time children will work together with artists and the Biennial team to develop ambitious exhibitions, projects and publications specifically for young audience.

An episode is a peculiar passage of time. Unlike the chapters of a novel, episodes do not necessarily add up; they do not even have to line up. The novel’s chapters advance a story, they follow their characters through set-backs and triumphs that lead them to learn and grow and change. It is like this, above all, with the Bildungsroman, the ‘educational novel’, still such a common type. But aren’t episodes just chapters published separately, and regularly, like the feuilletons of the nineteenth-century European newspapers, or the soap operas of our own times? Not strictly, no. Episodes can be discontinuous, pretty much like parallel worlds.

Many animated sitcoms and series with a limited set of characters develop across episodes which don’t have a temporal continuity. Think about Family Guy or Star Trek. The arc of each episode may take the characters through different worlds, but they always return to the same state of affairs by the end. Each show’s essential situation is restored within 45 minutes. It is why we can watch episodes in any order. It is also what allows the characters (and us) to travel to wildly different times and places, to the distant past and to the far future. It is because the characters stay the same that the worlds can change.

Artists participating in Liverpool Biennial 2016 are invited to contribute to the design of a number of episodes, together and with the curatorial faculty, taking the following scenarios as starting points. Through conversation, Ancient Greece and its spacetime parameters might become Medieval Europe, and a virus might become software.