Art review Football, God and seagulls keep city's beating heart front and centre

I narrowly avoided being targeted by a seagull in Liverpool when another critic pulled me aside just in time. Then again, she pressed the button to release the airborne poo – fake, I think – in the first place.

- Jonathan Jones

I narrowly avoided being targeted by a seagull in Liverpool when another critic pulled me aside just in time. Then again, she pressed the button to release the airborne poo – fake, I think – in the first place. This is Kara Chin’s funny installation in a cinema recreating the seediness of the seaside with squawking artificial intelligence seagulls on video screens, chaotic electro-assemblages resembling mutant arcade machines and a floor covered with guano. Liverpool is not by the sea, but close enough that seagulls provide a chorus as you walk between Liverpool Biennial art events in museums, galleries, warehouses and community centres.

I can’t see the Liver Birds on the skyline without remembering the first time I visited this city as a small child, seeing my aunt off on a voyage across the Atlantic, from docks that then loomed with massive ships. Proustian memories of the biggest city I knew as a child return with a vengeance in a raw warehouse space where the Turkish artist Cevdet Erek has created a homage to the noise and intensity of football crowds. He loves football and loud music. I meet him there and he enthuses about attending Anfield as research, and being inspired by a track on Pink Floyd’s Meddle. Flashbacks of matches with my dad surged.