Episode description

Slavery and empire building shaped Liverpool's development. Can art works help give a new understanding of the city's history? In a discussion organised in partnership with the Liverpool Biennial, Anne McElvoy is joined by the Festival curator Manuela Moscoso, by the artist Xaviera Simmons, the historian Dr Diana Jeater and the composer Neo Muyanga. The Biennial runs from 20 March to 6 June 2021 with art works sited around the city.

Neo Muyanga is a composer and sound artist whose work traverses new opera, jazz improvisation, Zulu and Sesotho idiomatic songs. His project A Maze in Grace is a 12'' vinyl record and a video installation at the Lewis’s Building, inspired by the song “Amazing Grace”, composed by English slaver-turned-abolitionist John Newton, who lived in Liverpool. The piece was co-commissioned by Fundação Bienal São Paulo, echoing some of the trading links which operated in the transatlantic slave trade.

Xaviera Simmons has previously spent two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the transatlantic slave trade with Buddhist monks. Her installation at the Cotton Exchange Building uses images and texts set against backdrops of the American landscape to explore ideas about "whiteness". It's co-presented by Liverpool Biennial and Photoworks

Curator Manuela Moscoso has worked at the Tamayo Museo in Mexico City and has come up with a framework for the Biennial -The Stomach and the Port- that uses the body as an image to think about the city

Historian Diana Jeater, from the University of Liverpool, is also Emeritus Professor of African History at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and teaches themes that help understand African history such as witchcraft and territorial cults, healing systems, nationalist movements and religious institutions.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

You can find a playlist of programmes exploring the visual arts on the Free Thinking website, include discussions with museum curators held in partnership with Frieze Art Fair and interviews with artists including Michael Rakowitz, Taryn Simon, William Kentridge and Sonia Boyce amongst others https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

And our 2021 New Generation Thinker Vid Simoniti is hosting a podcast talking to some of the Biennial artists called Art Against the World which you can find here https://www.biennial.com/