NEW // The Weekender
Illness meant that we missed publishing our usual pick of the week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond this Monday, but its fashionably late sibling, The Weekender, makes up for it…
Friday – Exhibition Opening: Transmissions: Ancestors – Silvia Battista 6pm @ at Bridewell Studios & Gallery – FREE
Artist collective Material Matters – Angelo Madonna, John Elcock, Patric Rogers, Silvia Battista – explore and interrogate the interrelationship between materiality, myths and eco-ethics. Last seen in these parts with their Into the Wyld residency at Birkenhead’s Williamson Art Gallery, tonight sees the opening of a new chapter. Titled Transmissions, this latest collab looks at ‘correspondences between the animate, inanimate and the metaphysical’ across four parts, with multidisciplinary artist Silvia Battista‘s exhibition, Deep Time, serving as introduction and departure point.
Conference: How To Read An Image 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £25.30/£15/£10
The image – a multi-textual, subjective artefact – is today, thanks to our CG, post-truth, increasingly AI-saturated world, a more complex thing than ever before. Luckily for us then that this three-day conference promises a range of insights into how to go about reading one. Speakers including artists, writers and researchers looking at, among other things, the ‘cis gaze’, selfhood and visibility as power, address the question: “how do we read an image when the image feels more real than reality?” Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard never felt so relevant…
Saturday – Last Chance to See: Linder: The Return of Linderland (until 3 October) @ Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool – FREE
Linder, who first came to attention with her arresting cover design for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict record sleeve, is now inarguably deserving of national treasure status. At Blackpool’s Grundy, the artist – born and bred in this part of the world – is celebrated in a remixed version of last year’s Hayward exhibition (top), with works spanning five decades of breaking and remaking the mould. Taking the DIY aesthetic and attitude of the post-punk scene as departure point, expect feminist photomontage, drawings, film and ephemera, alongside works by L.S. Lowry and paintings selected by Linder Sterling herself from the Grundy’s collection.
Further Reading: Autumn Exhibitions Round-up
Gig: James Lavelle 7pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £20 (+ booking fee)
Mo’Wax and UNKLE maestro James Lavelle has worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Mark Lanegan in a genre-straddling career that laughs in the face of the term eclectic. Tonight, his fusion of influences arrive at Birkenhead’s Future Yard.
Gig: Kristin Hersh 8pm @ the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room – £29.15–£34.65
I’ve followed with interest and admiration Kristin Hersh’s career ever since hearing Your Ghost, on which Michael Stipe duets, on a compilation getting on for 30 years ago. Her debut solo single, it is – as you might well expect – a haunting treat that lives with you well beyond its three minutes or so. Since then, Hersh has continued off the beaten path, making music that eschews the mainstream expectations that she and her then band Throwing Muses fell foul of when they signed for Sire/Warner Bros. And all the better for it; Hersh’s is a voice always worth listening to.
Sunday – Closing Soon: Wide Angle View @ Tate Liverpool + RIBA North – FREE
This excellent exhibition of The Architectural Review’s Manplan series – which looked at architecture’s social responsibilities – makes a mockery of RIBA North’s relatively limited floorspace, fitting tightly-curated sections of excellent photography within its confines. Published at the end of the ‘60s, Manplan strove to tackle questions of what a city might be, challenging the culture of the time across issues including Frustration, Local Government and Housing. Today, when cities often seem only to exist to relieve us of what little money we may have, the exhibition reminds us of other ideals, posing questions about social responsibility to citizens.
Mike Pinnington
Images, from top: installation view of Linder’s Danger Came Smiling, The Pool of Life (2021), photo by Mark Blower (courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery); Rachel Maclean, DUCK (2023). Film still. Courtesy of the artist
