Independents Biennial 2025 will return to Liverpool City Region with 22 new artistic commissions, 64 artists and new work appearing across Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, Wirral and St Helens. 

The artist-led festival, which runs concurrently to Liverpool Biennial, is created to showcase the vibrant art and art scene of the city-region. 

The Independents Biennial has been showcasing the work of grassroots artists since 1999 and has been known by various names including Tracey, Biennial Fringe and Liverpool Independents. It is managed by Art in Liverpool but programmed at venues and locations across the city-region by artists, artist groups, art studios and artist networks. 

In 2025, art will be exhibited at over 120 locations, some of which are traditional art spaces, others which are empty or unused high street or retail units. This year’s venues include Bidston Observatory, Hilbre Island, Dibbinsdale Nature Reserve, Bluecoat, The Atkinson, Huyton Village, The World of Glass, Crown Building Studios, Liverpool ONE, Mersey Ferries, Hamilton Square, Victoria Road in New Brighton and Fort Perch Rock. 

The artists who are commissioned as part of Independents Biennial live and work in one of Liverpool city-region’s boroughs. 

Those commissioned artists are Claire Beerjeraz, CBS Gallery, Rebecca Chesney, Jon Davies & the Sound Art Network, Alan Dunn, Ellis Eyo Thompson, Amy Flynn, Freddy Franke & Rat Shack, George Grace Gibson & Gee Collins, Ellie Hoskins, Anna Jane Houghton & Abbie Bradshaw, Noel Jones & 24 Hope Street, Brigitte Jurack, Dongni Laing, Georgina Tyson & The Royal Standard, Sufea Mohamad Noor, Daniel O’Dempsey, Tom Stockley & Ruaíri Valentine, The Drawing Paper (Show), Stephanie Trujillo, Jacques Verkade & Callan Waldron Hall, and Les Weston.

Commissioned Artists (First Round)

The full programme will be announced at a later date, featuring hundreds of local artists. The core commissions are as follows (more information on request):

Claire Beerjeraz

Archival and modern artefacts, recreated in an explorative exhibition charting Liverpool’s colonial history in the voice of local global majority communities. Diaries, physical exploration and place turn an installation of sand, soil and shells into a coastal archive.

CBS Gallery

CBS Gallery studio members are developing exhibition and gallery provision for longer-term improvements in artists’ access to galleries across the region. Their first exhibition is an internal group show, followed by Ghost Art School in July.

Rebecca Chesney

Tabloid newspaper of new images and text looking at the imagination of Liverpool in the far future. Predicted sea level rise will impact the city, but who will it affect the most? This project will reflect on the city’s history, power and wealth, the legacy of empire in connection to climate change, and will look at issues of community, class and inequality.

Jon Davies & the Sound Art Network

A day focused on sound art, foregrounding the talent and knowledge in the Liverpool City Region. The Sound Art Network is currently host to a number of different artists exploring sound in contemporary art and vice-versa, with different groundings in discipline.

Alan Dunn

A cover-version of Rutherford Chang’s White Album. More local, more economic, inclusive and more politically charged. Paul Young’s No Parlez from 1983 is the foundation for supporting our incredible independent record shops. For Independents Biennial, this archive will be presented alongside a new edition of the ZERO PLAN for the public to take away free of charge.

Ellis Eyo Thompson

This project is woven around exploring milestones of Liverpool’s history and coinciding these with the cosmic blueprint of the date such events occurred. The guiding principle is to bring a unique approach to view our city, highlighting that it is not a monolithic place that is separate to us but a mutable portal of energy that we are within and can therefore shape.

Amy Flynn

Site-specific cast pewter sculpture exploring the relationship between humans and the earth through the structure of techno-fossils that will appear to be growing from or revealed within the structure of a local venue. 

Freddy Franke & RatShack

RatShack, a new venue based out of a single car garage on Catharine Street programmes its first public exhibitions for Independents Biennial 2025.

George Grace Gibson & Gee Collins

‘Ransom notes’ for the art world. Distributed as a series of revenge themed A3 risograph printed posters to be hosted in/around venues taking part in the Independents Biennial. These will prompt visitors to take part in an interactive text service via QR code and/or phone number.

Ellie Hoskins

Taking loose inspiration from Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, two worms (Sheldon and Shlank) are faced with a choice: stay in the mud where their kisses taste of dirt, or wriggle up out of the mud for a snog in the sky and probably get eaten by a bird. Exhibition & film commission.

Anna Jane Houghton & Abbie Bradshaw

W O O L proposes a multi-screen / multi-channel filmic and sonic installation and activatory performance, accompanied by a physical publication, symposium, along with workshop and supper club events. W O O L will exist as a collateral exhibition to this year’s Liverpool Biennial titled BEDROCK which utilises the social and physical sandstone foundations of Liverpool, the people, places and values that ground us all as a curatorial springboard. 

Noel Jones & 24 Hope Street

“Improvised Hope” will transform the large windows of 24 Hope Street’s dance studio into an interactive digital canvas. This innovative project merges dance and technology, presenting an ever-evolving choreography of human and digital collaboration.

Brigitte Jurack

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Brigitte Jurack has been developing writing, monoprints and large-scale charcoal drawings that seek to articulate the dark times we are living in. These pair with an evolving mosaic installation.

Dongni Laing, Georgina Tyson & The Royal Standard

‘An Inquest Concerning Teeth’ is a series of creative workshops where the meal is the muse. The workshops we have created use food to explore the economy through the lens of local shops and the local seascape. The current Directors of The Royal Standard leading this project will invite artists to facilitate the exchange of ideas between artist networks from Liverpool and beyond thereby creating new relationships and nurturing existing ones.

Sufea Mohamad Noor

Time Spent Walking Through Memories is an exhibition showing a body of works by Sufea Mohamad Noor,  exploring time in the form of:

– Money spent/saved

– Health thriving/surviving

– Space used/wasted

Daniel O’Dempsey

A series of new poetry works championing conversations about sustainability in its broadest sense—addressing spiritual and mental wellbeing, financial stability, and environmental/domestic waste. The work encourages people to examine their individual consumption habits and waste production through critical thinking and self-observation. Regardless of ability, writing should be encouraged, and my public interventions support this ethos.

Tom Stockley & Ruaíri Valentine

CALL THE CATTLE HOME is a proposal by artist-researchers Tom Chachewitz and Ruairí Valentine for a collaborative project shared interests in mythology, psychogeography, history and ecology through an exploration of the Wirral Peninsula’s folklore and legend. The name is taken from Charles Kingsley’s gothic poem ‘The Sands of Dee’, a tale of the drowned cowherd Mary said to still haunt these shorelines. Like Mary, we will roam the Wirral in search of traces of magic left in the landscape and its people, documenting our research and sharing it with our community through public participation, ritual and contemporary art.

The Drawing Paper (Show)

The Drawing Paper presents drawings as a gallery, using traditional newsprint to display high quality photographs of the artwork. This limited edition print run will be widely distributed and Drawing Paper #10 will also feature online, with an exhibition at Bridewell Studios to extend the pages of print.

Stephanie Trujillo

Land art- performance, reinterpreting the Nazca Lines (pre-Columbian geoglyphs in Peru) to reflect the biodiversity in Merseyside. The artwork also opens the discussion around “nativeness” in the current hostile political atmosphere in the UK. Who and what is considered native, foreign, and/or parasitic? 

Jacques Verkade & Callan Waldron Hall

Our new iterative project delves further into digital extremities, imagining a virtual memorial service and what might be offered in a ‘digital after life’ for customers who wish to be immortalised through avatars. Each avatar acts as a reconstruction of an individual, storing their memories, tastes, activities and perhaps even their personalities beyond their day-to-day lives, instead reflecting their online personas and digital footprints.

Les Weston

Performance and concrete sculpture, tracking memories from moving into Netherley’s Lee Park tower blocks in 1964, to their demolition in the 1970s, and the opening of Belle Vale shopping centre.