A Needle Walks into a Haystack
Liverpool Biennial 2014
5 July–26 October 2014
Private views: 3–4 July
A Needle Walks into a Haystack is an exhibition about our habits and our habitats, and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. It is about effecting larger questions facing contemporary life and art from an intimate and tangible scale that’s within everyday reach.
The artists in this exhibition disrupt many of the conventions and assumptions that usually prescribe the way we live our lives. They attack the metaphors, symbols, and representations that make up their own environment, replacing them with new meanings and protocols: bureaucracy becomes a form of comedy; silence becomes a type of knowledge; domesticity becomes a place of pathology; inefficiency becomes a necessary vocation; and delinquency becomes an everyday routine.
A Needle Walks into a Haystack is a group show with Uri Aran (IL), Marc Bauer (CH), Bonnie Camplin (UK), Chris Evans (UK), Rana Hamadeh (LB), Louise Hervé (FR) and Chloé Maillet (FR), Judith Hopf (DE), Aaron Flint Jamison (US), Norma Jeane (US), Nicola L. (FR), William Leavitt (US), Christina Ramberg (US), Michael Stevenson (NZ), STRAUTCHEREPNIN (AT/US), Peter Wächtler (DE) and Amelie von Wulffen (DE). It includes four monographic presentations of Jef Cornelis (BE), Sharon Lockhart (US), Claude Parent (FR) and James McNeill Whistler (US, 1834–1903). It also includes a show curated from the Tate Collection with works by over 50 artists. It includes The Companion, taking place September 19–21, conceived with Angie Keefer (US) and featuring Federica Buetti (IT) and Jan Verwoert (DE); Concert: Chris Evans (UK), Morten Norbye Halvorsen (NO) and Benjamin Seror (FR); Jeremiah Day (US); Géraldine Geffriaud (FR); Josephine Foster (US) and Victor Herrero (ES); Will Holder (UK); Hassan Khan (EG); James English Leary (US); Jaxson Payne (UK); Mounira al-Solh (LB/NL); Lucy Skaer (UK); C. Spencer Yeh (TW/US); Oskar Schlemmer Dances with Erik Eriksson (SE), Darko Radosavljev (DE), Alma Toaspern (DE) and Christoph Wavelet (FR) and more. There are projects around the city by Christoph Büchel (CH). There is also a book co-edited with Camille Pageard that includes writings by Keren Cytter (IL), Angie Keefer (US), Hassan Khan (EG), Karl Larsson (SE), Eileen Myles (US), Lisa Robertson (CA) and Matthew Stadler (US), David Antin (US), George Szirtes (HU), Edward Said (1935–2003, PL/US), and drawings by Abraham Cruzvillegas (MX).
It is curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman.
There is plenty of additional information on biennial.com about how this comes together and where in the city it all happens, from new spaces to the Bluecoat, FACT and Tate Liverpool. Parallel events include the John Moores Painting Prize and Bloomberg New Contemporaries, as well as new commissions by Michael Nyman (UK) and Carlos Cruz-Diez (VZ).
