Culture Diary w/c 09-03-2015
What’s hot this week? Our pick of the listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…
Tuesday – Biennial Talk: Colin Muir and Dominic Willsdon 6:30pm @ Liverpool School Of Art And Design – FREE (Booking Required)
After the hotly debated Liverpool Biennial 2014, it’s never too soon to get a taster for what 2016 has in store. Tonight, scriptwriter Colin Muir and Biennial co-curator Dominic Willsdon will be in conversation to provide us with discussion and insight into the narrative structures, episodes and characters that are set to shape next year’s programme. We’re looking forward to it already!
Wednesday – Asylum (1972) 6pm @ FACT, Liverpool — £4
Curated by critically aware mental health organisation reVision, FACT presents their Society, Politics and Mental Health film series that aims to bring about awareness of mental health issues as portrayed on the silver screen. Opening with a discussion by LJMU lecturer and reVision member Malcolm Kinney, tonight we observe one of psychiatrist R.D Laing’s most controversial and radical experiments in the form of filmmaker Peter Robinson’s 1972 documentary Asylum. Documenting the disturbed existence of 20 schizophrenics housed in the Archway Community in London, we are forced to question the term ‘madness’ and its subsequent treatment.
Thursday – Opens: Liverpool Lift-Off Film Festival 7pm @ Fredrick’s Bar And Screen, Liverpool – FREE (Booking Required)
Now in its fifth year of showcasing the best of what short contemporary filmmaking has to offer, this three day fest allows student filmmakers and established professionals to show side by side a diverse range of European shorts, that place the fundamental necessity of narrative storytelling above the extravagance of big budget effects. Kicking off the festival with work from the likes of Chris Marker, Christina Hardinge, Jane Gannon and Federico Olivetti, Lift-Off Film Festival is continuing to prove its enduring ethos: ‘Look beyond the gloss. Put talent before technology’.
Last Day: Playtime 5.30-7pm @ Cornerhouse, Manchester – FREE
As we wave farewell to the Cornerhouse Gallery, this is your last chance to see this final exhibition on the current premises before their move to HOME (see here). Inspired by the iconic brick structure of the Cornerhouse itself and director Jacques Tati’s 1967 comic film Playtime, we are invited to celebrate the building that has housed 30 years of innovative arts. Featuring new commissions and existing works by artists Humberto Vélez, Naomi Kashiwagi, Niklas Goldbach and Shannon Plumb, notions of comedy, sound and space are explored to make playful use of one of Manchester’s most iconic buildings.
Friday –One Day Symposium On Arts & Disability 9.30am-3.30pm @ Contemporary Art Space, Chester – £20 (£10 Concession)
Running alongside the Contemporary Art Space’s latest exhibition Slippage: The Unstable Nature Of Difference, this one- off symposium aims to uncover the multitude of questions surrounding difference in all its forms. Speakers will include artists and researchers Alexa Wright, Karen Heald, Susan Liggett, Daksha Patel and Catherine Long to debate and challenge the uncertainty of physical and psychological boundaries.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Exhibition Opens: Format International Photography Festival 11-6pm @ QUAD, Derby – FREE
In its 11th year, this biennale photography fest promises the best and most diverse international work on offer. Divided into four key components — Focus, Exposure, Flash and Development — and showcasing over 30 of Derby’s most beautiful buildings, expect a programme of exhibitions and events that engages audiences in lively debate about themes such as narrative, love, religion and oppression, as portrayed in the photographic medium. A must for anyone interested in image making.
Glass Animals 7.30pm @ The Kazimier, Liverpool — £10 ADV
Tipped as being ‘one of the most exciting British bands’ at the moment (The Line of Best Fit), the Oxford-based Glass Animals add an unlikely burst of sultry tropical pop to The Kazimier’s March line up. As the last date on their UK wide tour before heading off on the summer festival rounds, tonight promises to be a night of ‘sparse sonic structures, delicate ushering of synths, breathy vocal hooks’ (Clash Magazine).
Saturday – Exhibition Opens: External Machines 12-5pm @ The Royal Standard, Liverpool – FREE
The physical, self-imposed and necessary tension that exists between constriction and relief are examined to full effect with original artworks and collaborations from the likes of Adam Ferriss, David Frame, Catrin Davies and Lewis Wright in The Royal Standard’s latest exhibition. Making use of the entire gallery space, installations, sculptures, digital works, prints, photographs and a programme of events seek to question the spaces we inhabit and ask: ‘where are the contraptions, machines and self, found aesthetically?’
Sunday – Last Day: Tabitha Moses: Investment 10-5pm @ Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – FREE
Winner of Metal’s Liverpool Art Prize 2013 and professional ‘rag bone archivist of the peripheral’, Tabitha Moses shares her personal experiences of unexplained infertility and the pursuit of fertility treatment to create this daringly intimate and beautiful exhibition. Through the use of historical and contemporary fertility symbols, we are confronted with the challenges and emotions that can accompany this often painful experience.
Last Day: Grayson Perry: Who Are You? 10-6pm @ National Portrait Gallery, London – FREE
‘It takes a real artist to get to the heart of Chris Huhne’ says the Guardian, and Grayson Perry certainly fits the bill in his latest major exhibition. Never shy of asking the big questions, Perry gets underneath the skin of some of the unknown, famous (and infamous) faces of modern society to ask: what is identity? And, how do we define ourselves? Featuring tapestries, sculptures and, of course, pots and vases that communicate what lies beneath the surface of outer appearances and demonstrates how vital our perceived identities really are.
Heather Garner
Keen to hear what’s happening in Liverpool January-March 2015? Download the PDF version of our NEW, printed Culture Diary here!
