2023 Liverpool Biennial

About

Liverpool  Biennial is the UK’s largest free festival of contemporary visual art. Artists exhibited at Open Eye Gallery are David Aguacheiro, Rahima Gambo and Sandra Suubi.

David Aguacheiro is a Mozambican filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, photographer and graphic designer. He works with photography, painting, videoart, metal, and installations. The themes that interest him most are the environment, human rights, and identity, using his work to provoke the viewers – provocation as a means to get people questioning and thinking for themselves.

David Aguacheiro’s photographic installation considers the ongoing extractivism (the removal of large quantities of raw or natural materials, particularly for export) of oil, timber, sea life and other essential natural resources from the artist’s home country of Mozambique, and its devastating impacts. By centring people through his poignant portraits, Aguacheiro suggests that the repercussions of this violence are complex, deep-rooted, and layered. The artist presents people stripped not only of their resources, but also their clothes, dignity and identities. The extraction is extended beyond that of the land to include culture, place, tradition, language, religion, worth, and self. The work questions the value and ethics of consumer goods and trade, asking us to consider the devastating and long-term impact on the people and land which remain.

Rahima Gambo is a Nigerian visual artist who came to artistic practice from photojournalism and by working independently on long form documentary projects. She explores the experimental and conceptual territory between still and moving images as it intersects with documentary, psychogeography, socio-politics, ecology, and autobiography.

Rahima Gambo employs walking as an artistic practice, using movement as a meditative and creative process from which to weave a visual story. ‘Nest-works and Wander-lines’ (2021) and ‘Instruments of Air’ (2021) explore the origins of language, embodied and multisensory communication, and speculative storytelling. The artist places video clips on a timeline, similar to found objects in an assemblage or words in a cut up poem, to create an out of time and out of place territory. Underpinned by an improvised and open-ended approach, the video installation becomes a capsule for the artist’s fleeting experience of traversing a particular rural environment in Laongo, Burkina Faso, where Gambo spent three months in 2020. With a background in photojournalism, here Gambo proposes an alternative to the documentary storytelling form, focusing on sensing rather than seeing and experimenting with new forms of non-verbal language. The works reject standardised and normative forms of communication, using movement, symbols, signs, gesturing, tracing and silence as preferred modes of understanding the world.

Sandra Suubi is a socially conscious visual activist, whose multimedia physical and sonic sculptural works are a response to her observation / study / experience of popular visual culture and social practices, especially in her country Uganda.

Sandra Suubi’s ‘Samba Gown’ is a statement of resistance. The work, originally devised as a performance piece, imagines and re-enacts the Ugandan independence ceremony of 1962 as a wedding ceremony. A procession in the Samba Gown is used as a metaphor for what happened that day when Uganda (bride) entered a binding contract with its former colonisers (groom). The work draws attention to the transactional relationship that exists between former colonies and their colonisers. The photographs displayed around the gallery document the wearing of the gown in various rubbish dumps in Kampala, Uganda. Comprised from plastic waste, the gown comments on plastic pollution as one of the major aftermaths of colonialism – Uganda receives thousands of tonnes of plastic waste from wealthy nations each year. Suubi evokes historical narratives, contemporary narratives on dumping grounds and the West’s exporting of waste, alongside contemporary forms of Western extraction such as knowledge and anthropological studies.