Culture Diary w/c 13-05-2019
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK – and loads of it’s free!
Monday – WoWFEST: Mike Leigh: Peterloo Screening with Q&A 6.30pm @ Plaza Community Cinema, Liverpool – £10/£5
Addressing Brexit, class, climate change, gender and more, this year’s Writing on The Wall Festival asks: “Where are we now?” This screening of Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, retelling events leading to the massacre of protesters in 1819 Manchester, feels depressingly timely. Leigh is on hand for a post-screening Q&A.
Tuesday – AFTER LIFE 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8
Last week I went to see a certain franchise-closing (we can only hope) blockbuster. It was, to me, inexplicably well reviewed, and not only by those publications whose lives depend on it. Of course, such movies have their place, and people can choose how they want to spend their money, and time – though choose wisely if that means three hours+. The consequences of our choices loom large in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life. In it, the director poses a deceptively simple-sounding question: what memory would you take with you when you die? Eternity, presumably, hinges on the decision.
Contemporary Arts Writing: What Does It Do? 7pm @ Waterside Arts Centre, Sale – FREE
The relationship between art and writing is an old and storied one. Looking back at significant movements over the years, where you found artists, you also found their critic pals – or enemies. While the power of the critic to make or break careers has almost inarguably waned, there remains a plethora of interesting voices responding to art now. Sara Jaspan and our own Laura Robertson are two of them. Tonight the pair join curator Mario Popham and artist Phoebe Kiely for a tour of exhibition Sweet Debris, following which, they’ll be getting to grips with what constitutes contemporary art writing.
Wednesday – WoWFEST: Queer Are We Now? 7.30pm @ LEAF, Liverpool – £12/£6
For five nights in 1969, members of New York’s LGBT communities demonstrated a police raid on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in the city’s Greenwich Village. The events set in motion the Stonewall movement, and led to the Gay Liberation Front, Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Pride. 50 years on, WoWFEST uses the occasion to consider how and whether things have changed. Human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell will deliver a keynote speech, following which, he will be joined in conversation by award-winning writer and director, Cheryl Martin.
Thursday – Un_bound Issue 1 Launch Party 6pm @ Static, Liverpool – FREE
When the seeds were sown for The Double Negative, it was in response to Liverpool’s fairly quiet critical backdrop. It has been with great pleasure that we have seen new publications with their own idea of criticality pop up and spring to life in the intervening years. “Thinking outside the boundaries of traditional art criticism”, it is with warmth and excitement that we greet Un_bound, whose own title and remit is suggestive of not being confined to current conventions and conversations. Tonight its team launches issue one, which you can pick up for free.
Friday – LightNight Liverpool from 5pm @ Venues Across the City – FREE
Every year, LightNight opens up the city – and art. Attracting people in their thousands to enter galleries and engage with contemporary art and artists, the free festival is back this Friday. With more than 100 different organisations involved, and new commissions revealed for the first time, you’re spoilt for choice. Design studio Dorothy launch global music mapping project ClubTogether, in the Baltic Triangle; marking the launch of bido100! is Sam Wiehl and Forest Swords’ audio-visual collab Ritual 2.0 in the tunnels of Moorfields station; over at the Bluecoat, artist anti-cool’s multi-screen video and sculpture installation Demolition Memorial Keepsake explores memorial ceremonies.
New Commission: Poulsen Arc Dream Radio 5pm @ Storyhouse, Chester – FREE
Filmmaker and artist Sven Werner’s new digital commission for Chester’s Storyhouse responds to the art-deco building’s architecture and the memories of people who have made the city their home but are not originally from there. Entitled Poulsen Arc Dream Radio, the work is an intimate one-person listening booth inspired by memory and place. “Chester is a city full of fascinating stories and communities,” said the artist. Hear them for yourself from tonight.
Saturday – Kitty’s Launderette Opening Party 6pm @ Kitty’s Launderette, Liverpool – FREE
Anfield’s Homebaked cooperative bakery has proved itself an enviable model for engaging communities in a business and watching it thrive. Setting up shop nearby is Kitty’s Launderette, successfully crowdfunded last year. “Reimagining the humble and well-loved launderette”, Kitty’s will be a space for social and creative activities, alongside the intention to provide affordable washing and drying facilities for people living in Everton and Anfield. Celebrate the opening tonight with music, drinks, and food provided – of course – by Homebaked.
Sunday – Exhibition Closing: Emma Smith: 5Hz & Euphonia @ Home, Manchester – FREE
Based on the musicality of social interactions, Emma Smith’s 5Hz & Euphonia invites visitors, says the web blurb, to “influence the soundscape”, and “learn a new alphabet that transcends language barriers”. When Smith showed Euphonia at the Bluecoat last year, our reviewer C. James Fagan encountered a work that, on the one hand “reacts and changes when a visitor to the gallery speaks or intones into a microphone”. On the other, he found a universal work attempting to address the self-consciousness and social judgements we’re all subject to.
Mike Pinnington
Images from top: Phoebe Kiely (Sweet Debris/detail); After Life (film still); ClubTogether/LoghtNight; Poulson Arc Dream Radio
