Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Open Eye Gallery

The Liverpool Biennial 2025 exhibition at Open Eye Gallery is one of the standout events of this year’s art festival, gathering the works of Katarzyna Perlak, Nadan Ghiya and Widline Cadet. We’ve covered the festival as a whole when it first began back in June, but this particular show is too just too good to miss and you still have until mid-September to catch it.

The exhibition features the artists’ work across the three separate rooms of the photography gallery, where two-dimensional images seamlessly fuse with sculpture and film.

First up, you’ll find Nadan Ghiya’s expertly created assemblage works which combine photographs with reconstructed wooden frames. The artist is interested in the development of photography and associated technology, and its shifting role in defining our perception. He combines found images with digitally manipulated photographs – they’re cut up, repositioned and arranged in highly decorated frames. In the centre of the room, there is a tower-like structure which visually brings the display together but it’s the wall-based works that really shine.

Gallery Two is filled with Widline Cadet’s poetic works which draw on the artist’s heritage, Haitian culture, folklore and intergenerational memory with Black diasporic life being the key motif throughout. As well as being loaded with meaning, the photographs are incredibly beautiful, filled with otherworldly light. The novel method of display means that the installation is layered, with photo wallpaper underneath some of the images and smaller frames either coming off the walls or covering large sections of the image like a fence. A lot could be said about this body of work but we’ll tell you this – it’s a genuinely fresh approach to photography and we recommend that you just go and check it out yourself for the full experience.

Katarzyna Perlak turned Gallery Three into a small cinema for her film The Land Beneath Sleeps Lightly (2025). Created in collaboration with Reel Queer participants, the film is set in Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel, once a luxury destination for wealthy visitors which offers only glimpses of its faded glory today. Perlak is interested in Queer and diasporic perspectives which are manifested in the form of a 20-minute, non-linear story with exquisite costumes and elements of the horror aesthetic. You’ll want to stay until the end.