Liverpool was built on trading partnerships around the world. In the last biennium at Tate Liverpool we have shifted the emphasis of our work to reflect the city's instinct to look outwards, and have begun to develop a more internationally- oriented programme..

As one of the most-visited modern art galleries outside London, Tate Liverpool offers a unique platform for established and emerging artists from around the world. An exhibition curated by the Los Angeles-based artist Mike Kelley1 was his first in Britain since 1992, and we were UK hosts for the first retrospective exhibition of the acclaimed German photographer Thomas Ruff2. Also in the summer of 2003, Janet Cardiff3, the respected Canadian audio and film artist, exhibited works including Forty-Part Motet, featuring Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium for forty voices, which became her first work to enter the Tate Collection.

Music has a special place in Liverpool's culture. Exploring connections between art, pop music and video, the Remix4 exhibition extended our audiences, drawing a younger age group to the gallery. Meanwhile, Shopping5, our most ambitious exhibition to date, addressed a universal ritual of contemporary culture and became the second most-visited exhibition in the gallery's history. A very different survey exhibition, Art, Lies and Videotape6, explored the history of performance art. In the same year, our Paul Nash7 exhibition proved the third most popular in Tate Liverpool's history, confirming the enduring attraction of this important twentieth-century British artist.

In 2002, as one of five participating venues, Tate Liverpool hosted the Liverpool Biennial's International 02 exhibition8. Featuring twenty-eight artists, many contributing specially commissioned work, it marked the first time that two floors of the gallery were used for a single major show.

It is important that we build on our work with emerging artists. The dedicated Project Space, in the Wolfson Room, was created in 2000, providing artists with an opportunity to develop and show new work. In 2003, we commissioned the German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg9 to create a series of photographs of Senegal. This was followed in 2004 by an exhibition of important recent paintings by the artist Michel Majerus10, who tragically died in a plane crash the same year. Most recently, the outstanding African-American artist Kara Walker11 made a powerful installation for the Project Space that has increased our international perspective and enlivened our connections with local communities, inspiring both our Black Audience Participation programmes and popular family activities. Kara Walker's commission for Tate Liverpool was her first UK solo exhibition.

Our displays from the Collection are themselves exciting exhibitions. Pin-up12 focused on the notion of glamour from Pop art onwards; Formal Situations13 presented abstract painting of the 1960s; The Shape of Ideas14 featured rarely seen small-scale sculptures, models and maquettes, some on display for the first time. It complemented The Stage of Drawing15, a display of works ranging from the eighteenth century to the 1980s, selected by British artist Avis Newman from the Tate Collection, and organised by the Drawing Center in New York. A dynamic ongoing display, International Modern Art16, showcases major art movements and includes important works by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

Since 2002, our education activities including programmes for schools and colleges, workshops and courses, have been well attended and productive. The children's Drawing Space was particularly popular during a display of work from the Tate Collection by the German artist Rebecca Horn17 and we have developed the scope of our artist talks and symposiums. We have increased the number of our partnerships, in both the public and private sectors, for a wide range of professional and learning projects, including an apprenticeship training partnership with Rolls-Royce. The Tate Liverpool Members scheme has progressed, and our Corporate Members and Partners, consisting of leading firms and organisations, have increased from single figures to more than twenty.

Liverpool's year as the European Capital of Culture in 2008 is an exciting prospect for Tate Liverpool. As we work towards it, our aim is to ensure that Tate Liverpool is recognised worldwide as a major European gallery for modern and contemporary art. We will be looking at how to maximise the potential of our building and our programmes and, above all, how to contribute to the success of this great opportunity for our city.

Footnotes

1. Mike Kelley: The Uncanny, 20 February - 3 May 2004. Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
2. Thomas Ruff: 1979 to the Present, 9 May - 6 July 2003. Organised by the Kusthalle Baden-Baden and presented in partnership with Volkswagen for Phaeton and Touareg
3. Janet Cardiff, Forty-Part Motet and Muriel Lake Incident, Tate Collection Display, 12 April - 7 September 2003. Forty-Part Motet purchased by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 2003
4. Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, 25 May - 26 August 2002. Sponsored by Twix and supported by Liverpool Culture Co. Ltd
5. Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, 20 December 2002 - 23 March 2003. Supported by Tate Members, The Henry Moore Foundation and the Liverpool Culture Company Limited. Media partner The Guardian. Shopping was attended by more than 24,000 visitors
6. Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance, 14 November 2003 - 25 January 2004
7. Paul Nash: Modern Artist, Ancient Landscape, 23 July - 19 October 2003
8. Liverpool Biennial: International 02, 14 September - 24 November 2002
9. Rut Blees Luxemburg: Phantom, 5 February - 6 April 2003. Fourth Project Space commission
10. Michel Majerus: Pop Reloaded, 24 January - 18 April 2004. Supported by Tate Liverpool Members. Fifth Project Space commission
11. Kara Walker, Grub for Sharks - A Concession to the Negro Populace, 1 May - 31 October 2004. Sixth Project Space commission
12. Pin-up: Glamour and Celebrity since the Sixties, 26 March 2002 - 19 January 2003
13. Formal Situations: Abstraction in Britain 1960-1970, 5 April - 30 November 2003. Supported by Tate Liverpool Members
14. The Shape of Ideas: Models and Sculptures from the Tate Collection, 13 December 2003 - 31 May 2004
15. The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act, 26 September 2003 - 28 March 2004
16. International Modern Art, 21 June 2003 - mid 2005. Sponsored by DLA
17. Rebecca Horn, 19 April 2003 - 11 January 2004

It is important that we build on our work with emerging artists