Culture Diary w/c 30-06-2014
What’s hot this week? Our pick of the listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…
Monday – Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland @ various galleries across Scotland
“An art movement is not something you can fake. Liverpool has its biennial and Gateshead its Baltic, but neither has a serious international art scene. Scotland does.” So wrote the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones on Scotland’s Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, a celebration of the continuing momentum of a nation correctly spoken of in visual arts powerhouse terms. With more than 100 artists and 60 venues, From Jim Lambie to Rosalind Nashashibi, Generation continues until January 2015.
Tuesday – Spring in a Small Town 6.20pm/8.30pm @ BFI, London — £8.50/11.50
Fei Mu’s 1948 study of desire and the ensuing ennui brought on by guilt is roundly considered the height of the first great age of Chinese film. Newly restored, Spring in a Small Town is a delicious taste of things to come in the BFI’s A Century of Chinese Cinema season. See here.
Wednesday – Private View: Ryan Gander: Make Every Show Like It’s Your Last 6-8pm @ Manchester Art Gallery – FREE
Recently the subject of a BBC Culture Show special, conceptual artist Gander now finds himself the star of a solo show at Manchester Art Gallery. Chester-born Gander’s practice, full of questions the answers of which are rarely easy to come by, here takes a sideways glance at “the relationships between author, work and viewer where the rules are constantly redefined”.
Thursday – Digital Revolution @ the Barbican, London –£12.50/8.50
Featuring artists as diverse as Björk, Marshmallow Laser Feast and Oscar-winning VFX Supervisor Paul Franklin (Inception), curator Conrad Bodman described Digital Revolution as “not a show that just looks at contemporary art, but film, music, video games and design, the way they relate to each other, and sometimes merge into one”. A look at digital culture from its early days onwards, this is an exhibition which could serve as both nostalgia and introduction to the genuine bleeding edge of the form.
Friday – Private View: Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs 4-7pm @ Cactus Gallery, Liverpool — FREE
Named as “the most exciting new player on Liverpool’s art scene” by ArtReview’s Oliver Basciano (here), curator Joe Fletcher Orr presents his own Biennial timed exhibition at his tiny, Royal Standard-based gallery. With new work from London based artists Jesse Wine and Glen Pudvine, expect an entertaining mix of crude ceramics and splotchy, primary-coloured oils.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Saturday – Liverpool Biennial launch @ various venues across Liverpool — FREE
Sharon Lockhart children’s takeover at FACT, composer Michael Nyman at the Liverpool Cathedral, chief French architect Claude Parent and James McNeill Whistler (yes, THAT Whister); this iteration of Liverpool’s biennale has a more focused feel about it – even as the overarching A Needle Walks into a Haystack title somewhat obfuscates things and almost undoes that good work. With a number of new commissions — and partnerships with Open Eye Gallery, LJUM’s Exhibition Research Centre, the John Moores Painting Prize and Bloomberg New Contemporaries as well as many other fringe events — check out the main exhibition at the old Blind School first then head down to see us at the one-off edition of the Art Car Boot Fair. We’ll be there in our TDN car, trying to haggle over a Gavin Turk…
Radical Geometry @ Royal Academy of Arts, London — £10/8
A fascinating counterpoint to Tate Liverpool’s Mondrian and his Studios exhibition, this new Royal Academy show is a stunning exploration into South America’s experiments with the ‘grid’. Plotting a course from the 1930s, which takes in the work of Joaquín Torres-García, to the ‘70s, when artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez (read our interview with the legend here) trod new ground with colour, Radical Geometry presents successive generations of artists challenging Western artistic hegemony.
Sunday – Brunch & Artist Talk With Ira Lombardia @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool — £6/5
Part of Open Eye’s Biennial exhibition Not All Documents Are Records: Photographing Exhibitions As An Art Form, around the Documenta festival 2012, have brunch with Spanish artist Ira Lombardía (b. 1977) over a discussion of her work and research (she has a PhD in Photography Theory in the Internet age) in addition to some of the theory surrounding the main exhibition. Is there a necessity for producing more images at a time when we are visually bombarded?
