12th General Assembly

The 12th General Assembly of the International Biennial Association (IBA) will take place from July 2–4, 2025 in Liverpool, UK, in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design and Liverpool Biennial. This year’s gathering unfolds under the title “No Home But In Memory” and brings together curators, thinkers, artists, and institutional actors from across the globe to explore the biennial as a living and contested form of memory work.

Initially planned for Santa Fe, the General Assembly was relocated in light of ongoing travel restrictions and border access concerns—realities that affect the landscape of art and cultural institutions the world over. In response, the General Assembly remains in dialogue with SITE SANTA FE’s 12th International, Once Within a Time, by contributing a recorded program featuring Dr. Estevan Rael-Gálvez and Cecilia Alemani. Their conversation on storytelling, cultural memory, and the making of counter-narratives resonates with this year’s wider theme and reflects an enduring spirit of translocal collaboration.

In a time of ecological breakdown, displacement, and ideological polarisation, the urgency of preservation and reflection becomes impossible to ignore. What does it mean for a biennial to act as an archive, not a repository of fixed meaning, but a site of living memory, where losses are acknowledged and alternative futures imagined? What histories do biennials carry forward, and which ones do they silence—and how do we account and care for these?

In Liverpool, a city built on economies of extraction and forced movement of people and materials in its colonial past (and arguably present?), we confront these questions against a backdrop of entangled histories and communities. The General Assembly is organised in partnership with Liverpool Biennial and is guided by the conceptual grounding of BEDROCK, the 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay. BEDROCK invites our members to consider the literal and metaphorical foundations of identity, belonging, and resistance, from geological formations to social structures, from cultural legacies to imagined futures.

This year’s assembly is organised in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design during the significant milestone of the 200th anniversary of the school, which has served as the first institution outside London to offer a pioneering model of art education in England.

The General Assembly will include a public day of panels, conversations, and talks, as well as a day of focus groups for IBA members and invited guests. These sessions will offer a space for collective reflection on the role biennials can play in preserving shared knowledge, amplifying marginalised voices, and enacting sustainable modes of curating and collaboration.

As institutions continue to navigate shifting political climates, limited resources, and environmental instability, biennial-makers are compelled to ask: What must we carry forward, and what can we afford to leave behind? What does continuity look like in a world of rupture? And how might we remember differently, not to reproduce what has been, but to make space for what is yet to come?

Why participate
IBA is first and foremost a community, and as such, its most important quality lies in the possibility of gathering and discussing together to provide support, advice and collaborative structures to each of its member organisations. Throughout the last decade and together with its members, IBA has developed cooperation programs between biennials, acted as an advocacy platform for biennials in need, and provided a platform for biennials to showcase their projects while at the same time building a valuable archive.

We invite biennial professionals from around the world to consider becoming members of IBA and attending our 12th General Assembly in Liverpool. Details about our program and how to RSVP may be found on our website.