Culture Diary w/c 08-04-2024
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…
Monday – Exhibition Continues: I Killed the Angel in the House 12-4pm @ Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE
Solo exhibition from Liverpool Hope University Fine Art graduate and multi-disciplinary artist, Niamh Tam. Showing until Wednesday.
Metal Liverpool’s Drawing Social 5pm @ Granby Winter Garden – FREE
A bi-monthly informal network, Metal’s Drawing Social welcomes all skills and backgrounds (over the age of 18). Expect informal sharing of projects, discussion around print, zines and comics, all accompanied by vegan food and snacks. You can’t say fairer than that.
Battle Royale 8.40pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8
Confirmed heavyweight of J-Horror, Kinji Fukasaku’s dystopian epic, Battle Royale (2000), blows (and hacks and stabs) all challengers out of the water. Rewatching the film recently, it struck me as remarkable that anyone would feel an urgent need to write such a thing as the Hunger Games (and its many clones), knowing this superior trailblazer was already in the world. If you’re a fan of Katniss and co, and haven’t seen Battle Royale, know that this is for you.
Tuesday – On the Waterfront 2.30pm @ FACT Liverpool
Back in cinemas to mark its 70th anniversary, Elia Kazan’s undisputed classic features Marlon Brando (alongside Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb) as a washed up boxer turned dockworker caught between male fragility and standing up to corruption. Notable also for the political climate in which it was made, Kazan directed the film having named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (something he later wrote haunted him).
Wednesday – Exhibition Opening: Saturday Town 6pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE
For more than a decade since the award winning project’s beginnings in Leeds, Casey Orr has travelled the country with her pop up studio, photographing young people on Saturday afternoons. An exploration of fashion, culture, identity and the ritualised nature of Saturdays out and about with your mates, this exhibition marks the first retrospective of Orr’s work.
Thursday – Artist Talk: Melanie Crean and Pilvi Takala in-conversation 6pm, Online – FREE
Artists Melanie Crean and Pilvi Takala currently feature in FACT Liverpool exhibition On the other side (below). Join them this evening for a discussion of the group show’s themes – collaboration, systems of control and, ultimately, human nature – and a wider exploration of their work.
Friday – Exhibition Closing: Annie Frost Nicholson: all of your textures live inside of me @ Dorothy, the Baltic Triangle, Liverpool – FREE
Since 2011, following the loss of her mum and sister in an accident, artist Annie Frost Nicholson has made work addressing tragedy and grief. You’d never know this at first glance, such is its uplifting nature; all colour and music, it is celebratory – of life and loved ones – and all the more resonant for that. Catch it while you can.
Saturday – BLUE JEAN 7.30pm @ Kazimier Stockroom, the Baltic Triangle, Liverpool – £9
An act whose star is very much in the ascendency, emerging talent and self-styled ‘indie-rock darling’, BLUE JEAN, is joined this evening by Maria Olsen and Samya O’Grady.
Sunday – Exhibition Closing: Babak Ganjei: Thanks for Having Me @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE
Largest solo show to date for Babak Ganjei, and part of the Bluecoat’s The Lives of Artists season, Thanks for Having me is a wry and astute fragmentary self-portrait as exhibition. Ganjei’s ‘film idea’ works will have you laughing in a gallery as never before. Read our review.
Mike Pinnington
Images/media: Blackpool, Casey Orr; Battle Royale (still); On the Waterfront trailer; Close Watch, Pilvi Takala © Rob Battersby
