Contemporary art has once again taken over the Scouse city for the summer: the eighth edition of the Liverpool Biennial opened today, July 5.

Since the biennial’s first edition in 2000, Liverpool has transformed itself into one of the UK’s most thriving arts scenes – helped in no small part by being awarded the 2008 European Capital of Culture – and every two years the biennial has illuminated the city in new and interesting ways. Everyone seems to get involved, such as the taxi driver who took me down a special route especially to see trees wearing socks on Park Place, or children pointing at Carlos Cruz-Diez’s “Dazzle Ship” in the Albert Dock.

This is also a particularly poignant year for Liverpool: it’s the 25th anniversary of theHillsborough disaster, of which the victims’ families are still seeking justice. To commemorate the tragedy, Michael Nyman will be performing a new piece, Symphony No.11: Hillsborough Memorial, tonight at Liverpool Cathedral to an audience that will include those directly connected to the disaster.

Leading the biennial is the citywide exhibition “A Needle Walks into a Haystack,” spread over five venues but predominantly set in a building that is both a former Trade Union Centre and an old school for blind people. This is one of the most fascinating spaces in the city; restoration has been kept to a minimum, so that the building’s previous incarnations can still be felt among the artworks.

The exhibition itself, curated along the theme of everyday life, is vast - but a few works still managed to stand out. One example is Peter Wächtler’s series of animated films depicting a heartbroken rat (Untitled, 2013), another rat made out of wires dragging itself along on crutches (Untitled (Crutches), 2013) and three homeless men sleeping around a fire (Untitled (Heat up the Nickle), 2013). The first of these seems to perfectly capture the mundanity of relationships and their endings, in its monotonous, yet poetic account of a life together: “how I finally got my diploma, without any awards, from the shit university I studied at. How I cheated on you for the first time.”

Nearby in St Andrew’s Gardens, two television screens play the documentary films of Jef Cornelis – a Belgian director who is little-known in this country. He made a number of films on the arts, including one on Richard Hamilton, and another on Documenta 5 – a landmark exhibition that, when it took place in 1972, was one of the largest, most diverse and most expensive to have ever taken place. Aside from including on-site interviews with such major figures as Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner and dealer Leo Castelli, Cornelis’ production techniques paint him as, in many ways, an artist in his own right.

In Tate Liverpool, architect Claude Parent has transformed the downstairs gallery into a precarious playground of sloping floors and split-level viewing platforms. Parent also specially selected the works displayed in the space from the Tate’s vast collection, including, among others, 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey’s now-famous Felix the Cat.

Sharon Lockhart’s films capturing the childhood imagination at work, showing at FACT(Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), are another highlight. Before coming to the biennial for what is her first solo show in the UK, Lockhart ran an educational residency in Poland for a group of girls aged between 12 and 16, in which they worked through a philosophical text for children by Bartosz Przybył-Ołowski. Lockhart has also reproducedMały Przeglad – a 1926 Polish newspaper entirely written by children.

The Liverpool Biennial seems to have been improving with every edition, and this year’s programme is no exception to that trend. It has resisted the temptation to overstate its relationship with the city, instead affirming this connection in more subtle ways – a significant inclusion of artists from Liverpool, for example, or its conscious commemoration of Hillsborough. This is, arguably, one of the most sophisticated editions yet.

Liverpool Biennial, various locations across Liverpool, UK, until October 26