Culture Diary w/c 04-11-2019
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 – The Big Lebowski 8.45pm @ FACT Liverpool – £7.70
“We want zee money Lebowski!” More than twenty years on, and the Coen brothers’ homage to Raymond Chandler still finds itself extremely quotable. More than that, it has exceeded mere cult status: grown men wandering about in dressing gowns, taking the name ‘The Dude’ – we all know a dude, right? – nursing a white Russian; it’s nothing less than an institution. Besides that, of course, it remains one of the Coen’s great successes, a film you’ll probably find really ties the week together.
Tuesday – Meet The Artists: Emily Motto and Šárka Zahálková 12.30pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – £5/£3
What is an artist’s process? Where do they find ideas, test them out? And how do they get from these crucial research stages to making and exhibiting? The Bluecoat’s Meet The Artists is a semi-regular opportunity to see behind the veil, ask your own questions and hear direct from the horse’s mouth over lunch. This latest iteration finds Emily Motto and Šárka Zahálková in the hot seat.
Wednesday – A Dog Called Money 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8
I feel like PJ Harvey is the kind of artist whose longevity means that everyone has their own Polly Jean album of note. For me it was 2000’s Mercury Prize-winning Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. While others will look back further still, the thing about Harvey is that she seems to remain relevant, whatever the era. Photographer/director Seamus Murphy’s A Dog Called Money documents her process, inspirations, recording and culmination – whether that be studio album, live art experiment or film.
Thursday – Exhibition Opening: OUT OF PLACE, a solo exhibition by Sam Porritt 6pm @ Paradise Works, Salford
Zurich-based Sam Porritt arrives at Salford’s Paradise Works, combining ‘dark humour, economy of means and precision’ for new solo show OUT OF PLACE. Porritt’s new site-specific installation follows his inclusion in the gallery’s 2018 group show, Tipping the scales, so PW head honchos must have liked what they saw. Drawing on timely, pertinent themes of displacement, surplus and need, the artist, says his gallery, works in ‘drawing, sculpture, text and the moving image, [and] is largely concerned with human agency and its associated ethical implications.’
Friday – What Does HIV Look Like? 10am @ Tate Liverpool – FREE
Behind the bright, vibrant works, full of recognisable iconography, Keith Haring was an artist concerned just as much with activism as he was with his profession. Haring leant his talent and his voice to campaigns against everything from nuclear disarmament and apartheid, to New York’s crack cocaine epidemic. He was also directly involved in raising awareness of and fighting the stigma surrounding AIDS. Today, artists continue to carry the fight. Among them, Liverpool-based Joseph Cotgrave, whose WHAT DOES HIV LOOK LIKE? workshops – exploring ways of rethinking HIV, its stigma, transmission and prevention – run today and tomorrow. Read more on Keith Haring
Saturday – Blade Runner Night 5pm @ Static Gallery, Liverpool – £12
Los Angeles, November 2019, reads the opening credit titles of Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece, Blade Runner. Appropriately, then, Static Gallery stages Liverpool Blade Runner Night this evening. Things get underway with a screening of Scott’s 2007 Blade Runner Final Cut, followed by an in conversation between associate producer of Blade Runner and Alien, Ivor Powell, and Paul M. Sammon, author of Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. As if that wasn’t enough for die-hard fans, the evening is set to conclude with the screening of gallery director Paul Sullivan’s DEATH OF AN ANDROID, with a score by VESSEL and Daniel Thorne. From the archive: The Cultural Impact Of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and The Ultimate Test: Blade Runner and Voight-Kampff Cinema
Sunday – Exhibitions Closing: Keith Haring/Sol Calero: El Autobús @ Tate Liverpool – £12.50/FREE
This exhibition has been a big hit with audiences over the summer and into autumn. Curated by Darren Pih and Tamar Hemmes, Keith Haring is an expansive trip into the artist’s world of 1980s New York – where graffiti, pop, hip-hop, visual art, underground clubbing and more came together to create a vibrant scene that resonates to this day. With more than 85 artworks, footage of the day and related ephemera, catch this one while you can. For more on Haring, read our preview. Also closing today is contemporary artist Sol Calero’s El Autobús, an “immersive and colourful installation inspired by South America”. Read our review of Keith Haring
Mike Pinnington
Images and media from top: Still from Blade Runner (1982); official trailer for A Dog Called Money (2019); image © Joseph Cotgrave
