[Dis]Location – Podcast in Conversation

Join us to hear artist Sovay Berriman and Liverpool Biennial 2025 curator Marie-Anne McQuay as they share insights from their work with Flamm 2026, with the theme of [Dis]Location.

Sovay and Marie-Anne will be in conversation with Jelena Sofronijevic, producer of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, curator, writer, and researcher.

Listen as they discuss this year’s artist exchange with Counterpoints Arts, a leading organisation in the field of arts, migration and cultural change, and the re-presentation of works by Linda Lamignan and Amber Akaunu, commissioned for Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK, in the context of the South West.

This event will be live recorded and released on the EMPIRE LINES podcast.

This event is FREE to attend, but booking is recommended due to limited capacity.

Practicalities: The site is wheelchair accessible.

About the Artists

Sovay Berriman is an artist working for 25+ years, based in Cornwall with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, film, broadcasting, research and social learning situations. Sovay’s work reviews and questions systems and structures of power, challenging us to claim agency and responsibility for the roles we play in the ecosystems we occupy. Sovay was the Clore Visual Art Fellow 2023-24, with a secondment with National Theatre Scotland and a published outcome, ‘ReWilding Arts Leadership’. In 2023 Sovay was commissioned by Hospital Rooms to make a new permanent commission for Longreach House, Cornwall Hospitals Trust. Between 2022-25, Sovay delivered ‘MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh’ a multi-platform project that explored contemporary Cornish cultural identity and its relationship with heritage, land, and extraction industries.

As one of the co-commissioned artists with Countepoints Arts for Flamm 2023, Sovay returns to Flamm this year to facilitate the artist exchange between Flamm 2026 and Counterpoints.

Marie-Anne McQuay is a curator & writer based in Liverpool. Most recently she was Guest Curator Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK working with 30 international artists across 18 sites. She was Director of Projects, Arts&Heritage (2022-4) developing commissions with artists and organisations including Glasgow Cathedral, Lakeland Arts and the Faith Museum.

Marie-Anne was Head of Programme at Bluecoat, Liverpool (2015-2022), Guest Curator Wales in Venice (2019) and Curator at Spike Island, Bristol (2007-2013). She is a Visiting Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, Fine Art & on the Advisory Board of At The Library, Sefton (2023-). She was part of the Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Committee (2022-25) and currently nominates for Henry Moore Artist Award, Film London Jarman Award & The Arts Foundation Futures Awards (Visual Art).

Jelena Sofronijevic is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, working at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. Their independent curatorial projects include Invasion Ecology (2024), SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries (2025), and Can We Stop Killing Each Other? at the Sainsbury Centre (2025), and they produce EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They are also pursuing a practice-based PhD with Gray’s School of Art, curating exhibitions with Balkan and Yugoslavian/diasporic artists in British art collections.

Much of their research centres on pluralising representations of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE)/diaspora communities and cultures, particularly from the Balkans and Yugoslavia, and more constructive, contemporary histories of non-alignment. More widely, they seek to platform lived experiences and perspectives often marginalised or excluded from representation, especially in anti-colonial and environmental activism. They work to make complex ideas accessible, not simple.