‘I have titled this year’s Liverpool Biennial ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’. In the isiZulu language, ‘uMoya’ means spirit, breath, air, climate, and wind. The biennial addresses the history and temperament of the city of Liverpool and has been conceived as a call for ancestral and Indigenous forms of knowledge, wisdom, and healing. It explores the ways in which people and objects have the potential to manifest power, while acknowledging the continued losses of the past. It is also meant to draw a line from the ongoing Catastrophes caused by colonialism towards an insistence on being truly Alive.

‘The artists have been so generous with how they’ve engaged with this concept. Something that Torkwase Dyson said keeps coming back to me: ‘I’m trying to desperately live up to blackness, to understand blackness as a true condition […] how the work can live up to the epitome of blackness.’ She reads blackness as a practice of world-making beyond the experiences of violence; as something we can aspire to. Her work Liquid a Place (2021) is a deep time conversation with the history of water, of enslaved Africans, and how they lost their lives. It uses triangles to create portal-like voids. They signify gateways, shelter, or sailing routes – the central passage. As a sangoma, which is an Indigenous ancestral spiritual healer, ocean and river water are both a place of worship and cleansing but also a graveyard.

‘From being chained in the hold of slave boats without air, to what continues to happen in the US, Black people have a long history of being denied breath. Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s contribution to the biennial is about Black breathing and breath as a means for individual and collective liberation. For her ongoing project Respire (2019-), she’s used music, sound, and breath with local participants to create a videographic installation. It positions breathing as a somatic response to violence, but also to pleasure and connection. Can our breath hold our ancestors’ pain as we breathe in, and release the pain and trauma as we breathe out?

‘Francis Offman’s work Untitled (2023) speaks to the Rwandan genocide. It centers around his mother’s bible, which accompanied her when she fled the civil war. This and other books are held by calipers, the instrument that the Belgian colonialists used to measure Rwandan’s facial features and classify them into racial groups that ended up having this internal conflict. This violence is juxtaposed against the joy of drinking coffee: repurposed grounds are spread on the canvas to create a painting. There’s a delicacy in the way these objects are placed, like he’s figuring out how to enter the wound.

‘I came to Lubaina Himid’s paintings because I was thinking about artists who were making work between 1990 and 1996, when South Africa was transitioning into the democratic country I grew up within. I wanted to see what Black artists in the UK were making at that time. Also, I’d always stayed away from painting because historically ‘the masters’ are always white men. Her work Between the Two my Heart is Balanced (1991), a reimagining of Victorian artist James Tissot’s painting Portsmouth Dockyard (c.1877), subverts this canon. Black female figures are central. Himid moves the women from being Black bodies – figures of enslavement, colonialism, desire, or invisibility – to Black beingness.

‘Eleng Luluan’s work is tied to her memories growing up in the Indigenous Rukai community in the mountains of south Taiwan. She is creating a monumental sculpture, Ali sa be sa be/Earth and Rock Flow I Miss You in the Future (2023), at Liverpool’s Princess Dock that depicts the legend of the birth of the Rukai founder from a pottery jar protected by two snakes. She invites us to meditate on this Indigenous perspective of world-making. She’s also referencing the landslides and typhoons common in her village because of climate change, and how this is tied to the climate conditions created in the aftermath of colonial violence.

‘An artist who engages with ancestral knowledge in a different way, is Isa do Rosário, a wonderful elder whose incredible paintings and textile pieces made of recycled clothes I encountered in Brazil last year. Her art is led by her spiritual conversations with orixás, deified ancestors within Candomblé, the African religion that developed in Brazil in the 19th century. At Tobacco Warehouse, she’s presenting Dance with Death on the Atlantic Sea (2023), using over 300 Abayomi dolls of the kind made by mothers with their skirt cloth during the voyage between Africa and Brazil. She imagines the souls of those who were thrown or jumped from these boats ascending and returning home.

‘Questions of home and wholeness are key to the work of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, who lives between Canada and Botswana. She looks at how cultural identities are tied to systems of class, race, and inequality and how that exists in our everyday lived experience. In her furniture, painting, and animation installation Mumbo Jumbo and the Committee (2022), she navigates family and community expectations with the limitations imposed by whiteness. What does it mean to exist in a world that’s been designed for white privilege? What does it mean to make art that sits in those spaces?’

Torkwase Dyson is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago), Gray Gallery (Chicago, New York), Pace Gallery (New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Seoul) and Maxwell Davidson Gallery (New York).

Francis Offman is represented by Herald St (London) and P420 (Bologna).

Lubaina Himid is represented by Greene Naftali (New York) and Hollybush Gardens (London).

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is represented by Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London).

Khanyisile Mbongwa has convened and will moderate the Conversation ‘Liverpool Biennial 2023 presents: uMoya - The Cosmology of Breath’, as part of Art Basel's Conversations, Basel on Friday, June 16, 3pm - 4pm.

Liverpool Biennial 2023
‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’
10 June – 17 September, 2023

Skye Sherwin is an art writer based in Rochester, UK. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and numerous art publications.

Published on May 9, 2023.

Captions for full-bleed images (from top to bottom): 1. Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Respire, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. ©Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński. 2. Lubaina Himid, Between the Two my Heart is Balanced, 1991. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens. © Lubaina Himid.