Liverpool Biennial

The UK's largest festival of contemporary visual art, staged across Liverpool's museums, galleries and public spaces every two years since 1998.

Founded in 1998 by James Moores with Lewis Biggs and a small team, the Liverpool Biennial emerged at a moment when the city's population had halved since the 1930s and unemployment was among the highest in Europe. Its founding bet — that contemporary art could catalyse urban regeneration without gentrification — proved consequential: the biennial helped secure Liverpool's 2008 European Capital of Culture designation and has since been studied as a template for cultural-led civic renewal from Detroit to Taipei.