Culture Diary w/c 02-05-2016
What’s hot this week? Our pick of the arts listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…
Monday – This is Now: Video Killed the Radio Star 5.30-7.30pm @ Bluecoat, Liverpool — FREE (Booking Required)
Be sure to check out the Liverpool instalment of the new touring screen project, This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk (below), presented by LUX and curated by William Fowler from BFI National Archive. Looking into independent straight-to-video releases from the post-punk era that were distributed before censorship laws came into play, the rare selection of shorts for the evening includes The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video Volume 2 (1984), The Miners’ Campaign Tapes: The Lie Machine (1984) and Echo and the Bunnymen: Shine So Hard (1981).
Tuesday — The May Blitz 3pm @ Museum of Liverpool — FREE
May marks 75 years since the Blitz of 1941; the heaviest bombing that Liverpool endured during the Second World War. 112,000 firebombs and 870 tonnes of explosives killed 1,700 people and made 76,000 homeless. Learn more about this defining moment in British history with this exclusive curator talk, a part of Liverpool Museums’ commemoration programme of the May Blitz.
PICK OF THE WEEK: Wednesday — Does Television Represent Us? 7pm @ The Black-E, Liverpool — £3/5
Part of Writing On The Wall’s 2016 festival, and one of seven events informing Goldsmiths University’s Future for Public Service Television Inquiry, Labour Peer Lord and film producer David Puttnam investigates the inquiry with a public panel discussion including Ken Loach, Phil Redmond CBE and Ruth Fox as speakers. Expect to take a look into whether television is representative enough of places outside the the capital.
Thursday — Re_fold: Music At The Jacaranda 7.30-10.30pm @ The Jacaranda, Liverpool — FREE
Ryoichi Kurokawa’s exhibition at FACT, unfold – an audiovisual immersive reinterpretation of interstellar data — collaborates with Mellowtone to host a night of acoustic music inspired by his art. Local acts such as Thom Morecroft, LUNA, and Dave O’Grady, will debut new tracks in an out-of-this-world performance.
Flying Solo Festival 5-14th May @ Contact Theatre, Manchester — Events Individually Priced
Celebrating the captivating power of solo performance, the Flying Solo Festival (above) brings together an array of solo artists, ranging from spoken word, to dance, to conference talks, for ten days of live shows. Our favourite picks are the show on climate change and the emotions surrounding it, Climate of Fear, Stuart Bowden’s D-I-Y sci-fi, She Was Probably Not A Robot, and the black humour performance by Igor Vrebac, My Father Was A Terrorist.
Friday — The Sky Trembles And The Earth Is Afraid And The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) 6.15pm @ Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London — £3-11
A cinematic adaption of Paul Bowles’ short story, A Distant Episode, The Sky Trembles (video above) was shot on 16mm by artist and director Ben Rivers, and features stunning footage of the natural landscapes of Morocco. Centred around a hallucinatory desert nightmare, this wild exploration of the unknown will be followed by a Q&A with Rivers himself, and hosted by the ICA’s Associate Curator Steven Cairns. Read our review of this work at Rivers’ recent show at The Whitworth, Manchester, here.
Exhibition Opening: Lee Mingwei: Between Going And Staying 10am-5pm @ Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), Manchester — FREE
Curated in collaboration with the 30th anniversary of the CFCCA, Lee Mingwei has created an installation, Between Going and Staying (above), named after the first line of the Octavio Paz’s poem by which it was inspired. An existential piece; black sands sieve through a cracked light bulb, slowly filling the dimly-lit room, as serene Chinese music gently accompanies.
Saturday — The Creative Process 11am @ Williamson Art Gallery, Wirral — FREE (Donations Welcome)
Enjoy this independent documentary investigating the practices of 14 Wirral artists, directed by Ryan Garry. The Creative Process shows the distinctive arts scene in Merseyside and the inspirations behind the works of local artists — following the process from the making in a studio, right up until it is displayed to the public in a gallery. What better way than to support your local artists?
Sunday — Exhibition Opening: No Fly Zone 5-8pm @ Ncontemporary, London — FREE
Presenting the works of artists within a garage space observatory, No Fly Zone (above) is a collaboration of different mediums viewing worldwide geopolitics. This show will include five projects by five artists — including Israeli desert photographs by Naomi Leshem and Mediterranean maps created by Domenico Antonio Mancini — exploring the contemporary international relations of the world through the intersections that shape the world as we know it.
Vanessa Wheeler
