Michael Stevenson begins each of his projects by conducting in-depth research into specific improbable phenomena that contain not only complex narrative qualities but formal ones as well.

For his installation as part of Liverpool Biennial 2014, Michael borrowed several sets of doors from the offices of Liverpool John Moore’s University School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. Local mathematicians have passed through them thousands of times. The piece was dedicated to another mathematician, José de Jesús Martínez (1929–91), who founded the maths department at the University in Panama City, and who believed that the devil resided in the swing of a hinged door. The artist took this curious anecdote, and applied it as universal truth.

Michael Stevenson’s (b. 1964, New Zealand, lives in Berlin) selected solo exhibitions include A Life of Crudity, Vulgarity, and Blindness, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, 2012; Nueva Matemática, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, 2012; and A Question of How Things Behave, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, 2010, among others. In 2003 Stevenson represented New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. He currently holds a full-time teaching professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg.

This talk was part of an afternoon of artist talks hosted by Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman, co-curators of the 8th Liverpool Biennial Exhibition A Needle Walks into a Haystack, and took place at the Liverpool Medical Institution.