Reading Ruscha
“This exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver.” Stephen Clarke rides shotgun through Tate Liverpool’s Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha… The text-based artwork, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS (1976), acts as the...
The Big Interview: Kristján Maack’s Glacier Portraits, and a Disappearing World
We know that they are melting, never to return. We know that they are so intrinsic to Icelandic culture that there is grief around their loss; a funeral was held for Okjokull, Iceland’s first glacier to disappear, and which once covered six square miles of deep ice. Kristján Maack is one of those grieving for...
Setting Forth on a Voyage of Discovery with ChihChung Chang 張致中
“Exploring the work of ChihChung Chang is to better understand the slippage between stories we think we know and those as experienced by living, breathing places – and the communities calling them home.” Mike...
Sacred & Profane: Haunted Paper
On the eve of a new Liverpool exhibition, showcasing the notebooks and collages of 2025 TLS Ackerley Prize-winning author Jeff Young, Mike Pinnington considers memory, nostalgia, and the writer’s creative process… In Yoko Ogawa’s...
Another Dimension – On Contemporary Drawing
“Drawing deserves our consideration and attention. It always did.” Mike Pinnington on the ongoing elevation of a medium… Drawing. It’s something we all do, until we don’t. When asked, all too early, to...
Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? Reviewed
Continuing a run of superb exhibitions, Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno hosts Jeremy Deller’s ode to Welsh culture. Laura Robertson finds echoes of and reverie in many versions of the past, a playful and...
Palestinian Storytelling, World-Building, and Time Travel: Our Preview of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) 2025
The latest Liverpool Arab Arts Festival arrives this Friday. Here, Mike Pinnington takes a trip through some of 2025′s not-to-be-missed highlights… Just like that, we’re well into July, and Liverpool’s cultural calendar continues...
“I’m trying to remove the structure of being watched.” In Conversation with Performance Artist Lula Braimbridge
A recent graduate set to stage performances at Stockport Garrick Theatre in July, Manchester-based queer performance artist Lula Braimbridge talks to Anna Marsden about embracing nudity, discomfort and the gaze… Usually, when it comes to...
The City & the City: Ripped Backsides – Reviewed
“City as shadow, spectre, crucible.” With Ripped Backsides, author Richard Cabut invites us on a free-wheeling trip through noir cities, finds Mike Pinnington… In Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides – aptly named for Iggy Pop’s The...