Bleue Liverpool: Article 19___
presented during Berlin Art Week 2024OPENING RECEPTION
September 13, 2024, 18:00
ON VIEW
September 13–21, 2024
LOCATION
ZÖNOTÉKA (Hobrechtstraße 54, 12047 Berlin)
Case Study AfriCola 2The exhibition Article 19___ presented by REFORMA at ZÖNOTÉKA during Berlin Art Week, marks the first public art community engagement presentation in Berlin, Germany by Bleue Liverpool. In response to international cultural workers facing McCarthyist-style sanctions on their freedom of expression. Liverpool’s practice derives its influence from the fluxus tradition of Intermedia, utilizing video, analog film, photography and text, along with new media techniques to illustrate spatially visual manifestos of anti-colonial feminist and non-binary diasporic movement(s)—movement(s) of inheritance and resistance with specificity in socio-cultural transatlantic cosmopolitan dynamics, such as those found in port cities. Within her practice, Liverpool produces non-linear, expanded cinematic essays and multimedia-informed, post-minimalist sculptural installations. These compositions infuse a subtext of esoteric Euclidean geometrical formalism, utilizing infrastructural, municipal, and quotidian material as allegory.
With Article 19__, Liverpool takes on a Situationist International (1957-1972) satirical intervention with the 1948 international document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In a new expanded cinematic essay accompanied by sculpture, she explores themes of state-censored suppression, contemporary colonialist expansion, quotidian consumerist use of Disneyfication and potential grass-roots resistance practices that can be maintained in the imminent event of complete government suppression.
The exhibition was inaugurated by a barter system of two situations, in which the artist facilitated a service and then provided a service in exchange for Afri-Cola Bottles as currency. In much of Liverpool’s work, she takes cultural inspiration from the present environment she is inhabiting and incorporates its paraphernalia, improvising on it as if it were a musical notation. Utilizing alternative economies such as the barter system highlights the necessity that in a potential collapse of dominant economic systems, where subjugation is vital, we, as a people, can generate cyclical resources for ourselves.
“I never could fathom that within these years of 1947-1948, the international document for global humanitarian natural rights was indoctrinated, concurrently during what would become some of the biggest escalations of atrocities of colonialist expansion in the 20th Century.” - Bleue
Materials & Media: OSB board, blackboard paint, graphite pencil, salvaged street wood (RR), Afri-cola bottles, video, a piece of ceiling, wax paper, glow sticks, patience, audio on usbs, determination.
Case Study AfriCola 1
A contribution from the artist's baby brother, the economist Ari Liverpool:
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Liverpool (b. Brooklyn, NYC) is a Caribbean-American fluxus Intermedia arts practitioner. She is second-generation Lesser Antillean of the island nations Grenada, St. Vincent and Haiti. Liverpool grew up in a port city, is talented at geometry and has inherited Movement(s). Her work is informed by multicultural anti-colonial feminist discourses, afro-surrealism, Situationist afro-marxism, and the Nègritude/Créolité movement. Liverpool holds an MFA in film/video from Bard College (2022), New York, U.S.A. She was The Mary Ellen Mark Memorial Scholar for the certification program in New Media Narratives at The International Center Of Photography (2018) in New York City. Liverpool attended Université Paris VIII St. Denis Vincennes for Cinema Studies and Brooklyn College for Documentary Film Production. Her candidacy in the practice-based doctoral program at Goldsmiths University of London in the Visual Cultures department will commence in September 2025, under the supervision of Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva and Dr. Louis Moreno. Liverpool has exhibited at the New Museum, NYC; The International Center of Photography, NYC; Artist Space NYC; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Tanz Im August, Berlin; The Center for Afrofuturism, Iowa City, IA; and at Espace d’Exposition de la HEAD, Geneva. Since 2021, she has been the monthly radio resident of the Bethlehem-based Radio Alhara in the state of Palestine.
Artist Bleue Liverpool
MEDIA PARTNER
