My visit to the Liverpool Biennial Group Show at the Old Blind School was accompanied by a guided tour of the exhibition ‘A Needle Walks into a Haystack,’by the Biennial Curator, Rosie Cooper. The exhibition hosted works of such artists as; Christina Ramberg, William Leavitt, Marc Bauer, Nicola L as well as Rana Hamadeh and Amelie Von Wulffen.
“A Needle Walks into a Haystack is an exhibition about our habits, our habitats, and the objects, images, relationships and activities that constitute our immediate surroundings. 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.” – 8th Liverpool Biennial Exhibition.
It was clear that this was a scrupulously curated exhibition, not only for the apt location choice of the Old Blind school, but also in terms of the interior layout of the exhibition space. The works appeared to be arranged in terms of there contextual likeness and relevance, in what appeared to be a thematic rather than a chronological curatorial approach; For instance, one room of the ground floor exhibition space, was dedicated to Feminist artwork. One such artist who featured here, was the work of Christina Ramberg, her work demonstrates a representation of memories of her mother who the artist witnessed 'transforming' herself in order to conform to male perceptions of idealised female beauty, or the so-called ‘perfect vision’ of the female form.
The artist was part of a movement in the nineteen nineties that focused on drawing the female body in unrealistic or distorted proportions. A theme in Ramberg’s works displayed here seems to be the idea that women are taught to believe that they should suffer for the sake of their physicality , with 'beauty is pain’ being a repetitive motif. This convention is emphasised within the ‘Untitled (five shoes)’ c.1969, reminiscent of the constraints imposed upon Japanese women who had their feet bound.
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