Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial eases into its first full week across the city and the public realm. There is the usual rich mix of institutional and ‘found’ spaces, with the city-wide arts festival a celebration of discovery as much as anything else. This iteration’s subtitle, BEDROCK, suggests nothing if not a solid foundation from which to build. Curator Marie-Anne McQuay and an array of international artists’ excavations of and responses to the city await. Check individual venues for opening times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the just-as-well established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as it ever has done. Taking place in an astonishing 120 locations across Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley and St. Helens, it boasts 22 new commissions of its 64 exhibiting artists. From degree show first-timers to the likes of Rebecca Chesney, Johnny Vegas, and Brigitte Jurack, there’s much to look forward to from this year’s showcase of grassroots art and artists. Check individual venues for opening times.

Tuesday – Last Chance to See: Fractured Familiar @ 50MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE

Bringing together paintings and sculpture by Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, Jeffrey Knopf, Jamie Kirk and Luke Skiffington, Fractured Familiar includes: 1970s cgi, medical models, signage, photography and 3D scans. Introducing glitches and uncertainty into such ordinarily typical territory, ‘truth and fiction,’ goes the exhibition blurb, ‘become blurred, forgotten and then reimagined’.

Wednesday – Sink Presents: Ben Vince 7pm @ Lost Art, Liverpool – £10 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Saxophonist, producer and collaborator with, among others, Mica Levi, Ben Vince rocks up in the Baltic Triangle’s Lost Art, showcasing new works ahead of the release of his latest record. In a packed midweek line-up, Vince is supported by Grey Streak & ELIJAH RIGHT?, Ria Bagley, and Kepla.

Bound 8.10pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Before The Matrix, siblings Lana and Lilly Wachowski made their directorial debut with this hard-bitten, sexy, 90s updating of the film noir. Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon star as Violet and Corky, who simmer as they plot the former’s escape from her mobster boyfriend, and find love amid a scheme to relieve the mafia of $2million.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Caroline Gorick: After Hours 6pm @ The Bridewell Studios & Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

At the intersection of abstraction and figuration, artist Caroline Gorick (above) presents new paintings inspired, she says, by “subjects found in my camera roll.” Part of the Independents Biennial, the exhibition – with themes including fear, memory, and fragility – runs until 18 June.

Friday – Semay Wu & Branton/Kelly 7.30pm @ Metal Liverpool, Edge Hill Station – £7/£5

An evening of atmospheric, innovative composition awaits at Edge Hill train station-based Metal Liverpool this Friday. With electroacoustic composer, improviser and cellist Semay Wu joined by experimentalist duo Nick Branton (reeds) and David Kelly (drums), expect the unexpected.

Friday the 13th 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

An absolute no-brainer of programming, check in with Jason et al at Crystal Lake for a stone-cold genre classic, this Friday the 13th…

Saturday – The Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Extended Editions 11am @ FACT Liverpool – £25.85

With a combined running time of 727 minutes, this special screening of Peter Jackson’s TLotR trilogy (the extended versions, no less) practically approaches a durational art happening in its scope. Marking the 20th anniversary of The Return of the King, make a day of it with Mr. Frodo, Gandalf and pals.

From the Archive: Nik Glover takes an in-depth look at on-screen fantasy

Liverpool Biennial Guided Tour – FREE

Don’t know where to start with this year’s Biennial? Each week, guided tours will take place from 2pm. Check the Biennial website for details.

Sunday – The Night of the Hunter 4.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.84

Writing about the film in 2014, George Jepson called Charles Laughton’s 1955 film The Night of the Hunter (starring Robert Mitchum as so-called preacher Harry Powell) “a twisted amalgam of Southern Gothic, a terrifying fairy-tale and vaudevillian slapstick comedy.” Adapted from a 1953 novel of the same name, it follows Mitchum’s psychopathically cruel ex-convict weedling his way into the unfortunate lives of a former cellmate’s family, in the name of hidden loot.

Further reading: Adam Scovell on The Night of the Hunter

Orchestra Baobab 7.30pm @ Liverpool Philharmonic Hall – £31/£26

I had one of those sit up and take notice of what’s on the radio moments recently, when Cerys Matthews played Senegalese dance troupe, Orchestra Baobab, on her 6music show (the song that grabbed my attention was Ray M’bele). Formed in the 1970s, they’re currently touring their winning blend of Afro-Cuban, pop and Griot (a West African oral tradition of music and storytelling) in venues across Europe. This Liverpool date is programmed in partnership with festival supremos, Africa Oyé.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The Night of the Hunter still; Independents Biennial, The Old Fire Station; Ben Vince, Don’t Give Your Life; Cast, 2025, by Caroline Gorick: Friday the 13th trailer; Orchestra Baobab poster, Toucan Tango

Monday – The Drawing (Paper) Show @ Bridewell Studios and Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Drawing – so often seen merely as the preliminary steps before the ‘real’ art is made – is, quite rightly, celebrated in and of itself here, with the joyous return of The Drawing Paper. A publication last seen in 2015, 2023 sees it return in earnest with 50 artists (both local and global) foregrounding drawing for drawing’s sake in this exhibition, and a special, new edition of the Drawing Paper. 

Further Reading: In Pictures: Drawing(Paper)Show 2023 – Curators’ Picks

Tuesday – Exhibition Closing: Maeve Thompson: Rabbit Holes in the Playing Field @ The Royal Standard, Liverpool – FREE

Last chance to see this first solo show for Maeve Thompson, an artist working across sculpture, film, field notes and installation to explore themes of personal histories, place and the urban and organic mundane.

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) 9pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Debut documentary from Anton Corbijn, exploring Hipgnosis, the design studio behind iconic album sleeve artwork from Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin to 10cc and Paul McCartney. Includes archive footage and interviews with some of the many musicians the innovative, ground-breaking studio worked with over the years.

Wednesday – The Utopia Strong + Daniel Thorne 7pm @ Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool – £15

Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi, and Michael J. York are The Utopia Strong. Of their self-titled debut, Torabi has said that the electronic innovators “didn’t expect the music to sound so ecstatic and positive… Without wanting to puncture the mystery, there really felt like an element of magic at play.” Now touring in support of follow up album, 2022′s International Treasure, they’re joined on the Liverpool leg by Immix Ensemble’s Daniel Thorne.

Thursday – Book Launch: Vestige 6-8pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE (Booking Required)

“I forget every kiss we shared. Surely there were so few…” Inspired by the real-life breakdown of photographer AJ Wilkinson’s 25-year relationship with his soulmate, and with words of heartbreak and solace by Open Eye’s Poet-in-Residence Pauline Rowe, tonight sees the launch of their resulting book, Vestige. Expect a night of live readings, live music and reflection, as the two authors are joined by our co-founder, Laura Robertson.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Biennial 2023: Y Bala: Anna Jane Houghton and Abbie Bradshaw 6pm @ The Royal Standard, Liverpool – FREE 

The Royal Standard’s whirlwind of Biennial programming continues this Friday with the opening of Anna Jane Houghton and Abbie Bradshaw’s Y Bala. An exhibition employing performance and sound to ‘activate ambient and tacit histories of space’, key themes include folklore, folk-horror and the body in landscape.

Sight & Sound Top 10 – 2001: A Space Odyssey 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

It’s no surprise to me that Stanley Kubrick’s love letter to losing your mind in outer space while coming face to face with the key to humanity sits pretty in the latest Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll. Topping the directors’ list and placing sixth with the critics, with 2001, I realised film could also be art. And while there’s no bad time to watch it, now seems apt, given current debates raging about AI. No less than a masterpiece.

Saturday – Renaissance Rediscovered @ Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

New permanent display of the Walker’s Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art. Featuring more than 200 works, expect painting, sculpture, decorative art objects, prints, and drawings. Headline names include Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt; in addition, new research has taken place to reconsider histories that have previously been excluded.

WIMIN Festival 11am @ Lock & Quay, Bootle, Liverpool – £24

With 80% of women stating they feel unsafe in Liverpool’s music spaces, events foregrounding the conversation are crucial. One of those is WIMIN Festival, headlined this Saturday by Katy J Pearson. WF director Holly Tulloch explains that the goal “is to challenge the status quo and foster an environment where women can thrive in the industry without limitations or barriers.” To which we say a resounding hear, hear. Plus, more creative opportunity and diversity results in a win for all.

Sunday – The Red Queen & Other Monsters 3pm/7pm @ Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot – £3-£30

From Medea to Electra, prominent women of mythology and literature – so often seen through a patriarchal lens – have rarely fared well. Of late, such figures have been revisited and reimagined, as they are in this Ink and Curtain production, which gives refreshing voice to new and different perspectives.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Nutsa Gogaladze, In the garden (2023); Squaring the Circle trailer; AJ Wilkinson, Vestige (2023); still from 2001: A Space Odyssey; Rembrandt, Self-Portrait as a Young Man © Gareth Jones

From Windrush heroes to club culture to talking dogs: all you need to know about the upcoming British Art Show 9…

Name:

British Art Show 9 (#BAS9). As in, the ninth version: it’s been introducing us to new British artists every five years or so since 1979.

First impressions:

A massive, chaotic and pretty lively showcase of 47 artists from all four corners of the UK, touring to a venue near you – if you live near Aberdeen, Manchester, Wolverhampton or Plymouth – from July. In our first summer of art in what feels like 3000 years, expect a lot of film and a lot of reflection. And some laughs.

Why should I care?

Taking the temperature of art from 2015 to now, via Brexit, Covid and Black Lives Matter, how could you not care? The new work I’ve seen so far is either taking a very sensitive look at real life, or taking the piss. Which is probably what I need right now.

Expect award-winning and mid-career artists who’ve made noise over those previous five years. BAS artists – like Monster Chetwynd and Wolfgang Tillmans – usually go on to the Turner Prize. It’s like the BAFTAs predicting the Oscars.

Who’s in it then?

GAIKA, who’s making a monument to Black heroism called ZEMEL, after his Uncle Zemel, to immortalise the Windrush generation. Florence Peake’s been pressing wet clay over care workers’ bodies and dragging them out, leaving large crumpled sculptures behind in Crude Care. Simeon Barclay’s film With Small Forward is about Manchester’s infamous club culture. And Patrick Goddard’s film, Animal Antics, features a talking dog and his owner visiting a zoo and discussing the natural world – “They’re not kinky, Sarah, they’re monkeys.”

What they say:

In preparation, the curators – Irene Aristizábal (BALTIC) and Hammad Nasar (Paul Mellon Centre) – went on a road trip to meet 230 artists in 23 cities. They cite their visit to Northern Ireland as fundamentally changing the shape of the show; journalist Lyra McKee had just been murdered. The trip exposed “cracks in the reality of the British nation” and the circumstances under which artists are working.

As a result, BAS artists have been asked to dip into three areas: ‘Care, healing, reparative history’; ‘Tactics for togetherness’; and ‘Imagining new futures’.

What you say:

What’s the talking dog called? Will the cinema seats be comfy? Will we have to book?

Where?

So many places, it’s a lot for my lockdown-mind to take in: opening at Aberdeen Art Gallery in July, then travelling in January next year to Wolverhampton’s Art Gallery and School of Art, then all over Manchester – at Castlefield Gallery, the CFCCA, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery and The Whitworth – and later to Plymouth – at KARST, The Levinsky Gallery, The Box and The Gallery. There’s also a colourful website with downloadable music, films and a publication.

Fave bits?

They’ll be different artists at different venues, adding a bit of local flavour. The film programme boasts a lot of moving image and a ‘black box’ in each city, showing a selection of films on a daily basis. Please god, let this be a sorely-missed cinematic experience rather than a hard-wooden-bench-in-a-cold-gallery deal.

Not so great bits?

They’ll be different artists at different venues, so you might miss the most interesting people. The website doesn’t have any of the promised downloadable music or videos on it, yet. And I can’t see any buttons to click to get updates of stuff happening nearest me.

Would you take your mates?

Absolutely.

Describe it in three words:

Loud, critical, meditative.

Laura Robertson

See British Art Show 9 at participating venues from 10 July 2021 to 23 December 2022 – free entry. Expect social distancing rules to apply, and booking may be required @haywardgallery

#BAS9 dates for the diary:

Aberdeen 10 Jul–10 Oct 2021 @AbdnArtMuseums

Wolverhampton 22 Jan–10 Apr 2022 @WolvArtGallery @wlv_soa

Manchester 13 May–4 Sep 2022 @CastlefieldGall @CFCCA_UK @HOME_mcr @mcrartgallery @WhitworthArt

Plymouth 8 Oct–23 Dec 2022 @karstgallery @PlymUni @theboxplymouth @thegallery_pca

Read about Simeon Barclay and the Liverpool Biennial Associates

Images from top: Alberta Whittle, Celestial Meditations, 2018 © the artist. Courtesy of Alberta Whittle and Copperfield, London. Marianna Simnett, Blood in My Milk, 2018, video still. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery

Amid government cuts and ambivalence, Jacob Bolton finds hope and the means to keep public spaces alive in a new presentation of Madiha Aijaz’s work…

Nelson library is busy. At the computers there are tradespeople hunting cheap tools off eBay, students feeling the weight of the Friday afternoon, mums navigating universal credit mazes. Their kids play between the aisles of books, hundreds of which are in Urdu and Polish. There’s a group of women knitting in a side-room, and a display for children’s events coming up that month. It’s animated, is what I’m saying – public space getting well-used.

Also here, scattered throughout the building, are Madiha Aijaz’s photos and films. They were selected by In-Situ, and Mums 2 Mums, a parent’s network based in Nelson who between them share a vast number of languages, the area’s linguistic richness nourished by years upon years of migration during Lancashire’s explosive industrialisation. One wall of the library is lined with The Librarians: low-lit portraits of linguists of dying languages. They are photographed in their space, at ease, commanding the air around them, yet there’s also a sense of defeat, of the photo being not  just a portrait but an act carried out in preparation of a memoriam: they are embodied knowledge, and when they go so will the keys to unlock the poetry traditions they have dedicated their lives to. A short film upstairs (nestled next to the microfilm archives and books on the witch trials of nearby Pendle) looks at the theosophical society in decline, cut with shots of children pouring into a school, making new knowledge, their own language.

The centrepiece, These Silences Are All The Words (2017–18), is comprised of librarians’ conversations: they chat about who is coming into the library later that day, they mistranslate and laugh about it, they lament the slow death of their languages and how Urdu TV presenters are beginning to use the English phrase ‘viewers’, mispronounced as ‘weavers’. The shots are long, reflective and enchanting – dust passing through sunbeams falling onto piles of books, the view of the traffic through a window, a plant taking root in the cracked concrete outside.

The violence of colonialism and postcolonialism comes both fast and slow. The fast violence is that of displacement, occupation and destabilisation, and it’s the more visible of the two. Infamously, Karachi is no stranger to it: following the partition in 1948, in which British India was split into India and Pakistan, the city became a major site of conflict. Waves of unrest followed, including the 1972 language riots (which some date as the start of Karachi’s ‘Three Decades of Violence’), in which the Urdu-speaking population was left alienated and angry following a government bill to establish Sindhi as the sole official language of the province. Words, and people’s right to use them, cut deep in Karachi.

The slower kind of violence is the long-term systemic violence of negating a culture, eroding a language, neglecting civic and social infrastructure to let it stagnate and fall apart. “There is no town planning”, one of the librarians remarks on Karachi’s rapid construction after years of unrest, “burgeoning cities lose their sense of humanity”. This kind of violence is very difficult to see. Aijaz manages to show it though, through looking at what is missing, what is becoming empty, unused, neglected – the cracks in the concrete, the rooms full of books with the lights left switched off, the fading health of the librarians carrying languages that are dwindling with them.

Aijaz’s work demonstrates that the starvation of sites of public knowledge amounts to state violence. This slow violence can also be seen in the UK right now, with libraries left to rot under austerity. In 2016 Lancashire County Council announced it would close 20 of its 73 branches. Last year the library budget was cut by a further 10%, double the national average. Councils are obliged to provide a baseline library service, yet no funding is ring-fenced for them. A 30,000-strong petition to allocate dedicated funding was rejected last year, on the basis of “giving greater funding flexibility to local authorities”, in which “flexibility” translates to offloading the accountability of cuts to desperately strapped councils. What’s at stake here, and what Aijaz’s work really gets at, is the ongoing loss of public space and the loss of public knowledge, knowledge as commons, a civic fabric that we are all, incidentally, both ‘weavers’ and ‘viewers’ of.

Situating the work in Nelson library acts as a quiet protest against these brutal cuts, a calm but firm call to use public spaces, keep them alive. The shots of the dust in the libraries falling into neglect feel almost prophetic here, showing what may become of the space if it doesn’t survive. Maybe it’s the silence of these scenes that gave the work its title, the only ‘words’ that can carry the quiet devastation of willful decay, the slow violence of disinvestment.

We won’t ever know for sure: earlier this year, Madiha suffered a cardiac arrest, aged 38. It was unexpected. In 2018, we had spent a couple days together walking around in the sun in Liverpool after working on the installation of her work at Open Eye Gallery, and we kept in touch. For what it’s worth, I want to share that she was a truly wonderful person, who cared a great deal, and who always had the right words.

Jacob Bolton

Jacob saw Madiha Aijaz presented by In-Situ at Nelson Library as part of the Liverpool Biennial Touring Programme

Images, from top: Madiha Aijaz: Memorial for the Lost Pages (film still, 2018); These Silences Are All The Words (2017–18)

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 Past in the Present + Q&A 5.50pm @ HOME, Manchester – £9.50/Concs

The Past in the Present sees Palestinian directors (from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza) interrogate different aspects of their nation’s history. Illustrating and informing the conversations is a trio of film screenings. The Silent Protest: Jerusalem 1929 deals with a Palestinian women’s movement in Jerusalem; Eight Years Later traces director Salim Abu Jabal’s search for children he had met in 2010 during non-violent protests against Israel’s occupation. Finally, in Gazagraph, director Yousef Nateel tracks down Gaza city’s photography studio owners, to pictorially address migration and injustice.

Tuesday – Diego Maradona + Q&A 7.45pm @ ICA, London – £13/Concs

What was it that made Diego Maradona rebel, cheat, hero and God all rolled into one? For Asif Kapadia’s new film, he zeros in on Maradona’s time at Napoli, where he ignited an astonishing reversal of fortunes, to inspire the club’s first Serie A league title, a feat matched only by his winning of the World Cup in 1986. Those incredible highs were, of course, only part of the story. Director Kapadia (Senna, Amy) is on hand to answer questions post-screening about El Pibe de Oro (the Golden Boy). Read our review.

Wednesday – In Conversation: Lynsey Hanley and Darren McGarvey 6pm @ Tate Liverpool – £5

If, like us, class and social inclusion are subjects close to your heart, put this in your diary. Authors Lynsey Hanley (Estates: An Intimate History) and Darren McGarvey (Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass) bring the conversation into the institution, and will surely raise some important, very pertinent issues along the way.

Exhibition Opening: New Found Land – Anna Gonzalez Noguchi 6pm @ Caustic Coastal, Salford – FREE

Homeware, tools, a broken pencil – quotidian marks of a life seem to litter the work of Anna Gonzalez Noguchi. Based in London, through sculpture and pre-existing personal objects, Spanish Japanese artist Gonzalez Noguchi negotiates subjects including territory, family and memory to, as she puts it, “anchor experience in tangible forms”. For this solo exhibition, the RCA graduate has made new works, including a new public sculpture.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Cindy Sherman @ National Portrait Gallery, London – £18-20 / Concs

While still studying art at college, Cindy Sherman made Doll Clothes (1975), a work laced with identity politics, representation and satire. Using stop-motion animation, the film sees a paper doll trying on various outfits in front of a mirror and is as fresh today as it was when it was made. Since then, Sherman has become one of the most important and influential artists working today. Tracing the artist’s career from the mid-70s to the present day, and featuring around 150 works, the exhibition focuses on Sherman’s subversion of film, advertising and fashion.

What Artists Want : What Artists Need 11am @ Feral Art School, Hull – FREE

Convened to discuss HE art education, alternative models and routes into professional practice, this wide-ranging event will no doubt throw up some hot button issues. As very real and threatened cuts for colleges and universities continue to take their toll, What Artists Want : What Artists Need seeks, among other things, to discuss alternatives to traditional models, hopefully offering hope and innovation alongside the ever-lurking despair. Speakers include Jamie Sorensen, Kerry Harker, Paul Stewart, Äslaug Thorlacius and John Heffernan. Read more about Feral Art School.

Friday – Public You & Me Closing Party with Figs in Wigs 6-9pm @ AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent – FREE

There’s been textile printing with inked-up shoes, letterpress protests and furniture making over the past four weeks, and now this stage of Public You & Me is coming to a close: an experimental (and free) public events programme led by artists at the excellent AirSpace gallery and studios in Stoke. Head down tonight to see what everyone’s been making, have a few drinks and hear what the future holds – with entertainment provided by comedic cabaret troupe Figs In Wigs and DJ Calum Murphy.

Windrush to Liverpool 6pm @ Blackburne House, Liverpool – FREE

Windrush Day (earlier this month), commemorated the occasion more than seven decades ago that saw hundreds of people from the Caribbean arrive in Britain to start new lives. With government mishandling and hypocrisy leading to allegations of ongoing institutionalised racism, over the next two days, Windrush to Liverpool takes stock of that legacy. The evening kicks off with Home From Home, a play by Marjorie H Morgan, followed by a Q&A on the Windrush compensation impact, while conversations and events continue on Saturday.

Saturday – Sonic Yootha 4th Birthday: The Real Thing 9pm @ 24 Kitchen Street, Liverpool – FREE

The self-described “new wave, old rave, disco, electro, rock, pop and soul social for homos, heteros, drag shows & don’t knows”, this weekend sees Sonic Yootha turn four (you don’t look a day over three and a half!). Following their hosting of the Keith Haring after party, no doubt spirits will be very high indeed. As it says on the tin, expect a genre mash up to please everyone, including party bangers from the likes of Donna Summer and Blondie, Elastica, Britney and Madonna.

Sunday – Sounds and Silence Cinema: Pandora’s Box 7pm @ Phase One, Liverpool – £10

The plays of Frank Wedekind were considered to have foreshadowed German expressionism, and two of them – Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1905) – inspired this 1928 film. Directed by G.W. Pabst, there are certainly shades of the movement that thrived in Weimar Germany here. Premiering in 1928, the film version of Pandora’s Box starred Louise Brooks as the doomed Lulu, a showgirl and serial seducer, in this classic of silent cinema. With live music written and performed especially by Tony Judge and the promise of themed drinks, you can almost feel the decadent devil may care chic of the era.

Exhibitions Closing: Madiha Aijaz @ In-Situ, Brierfield and Nelson/ Reetu Sattar @ Super Slow Way, Burnley – FREE

This Sunday sees a double-bill of Lancashire-based Biennial touring exhibitions close. Madiha Aijaz at Brierfield and Nelson’s In-Situ includes film works exploring the public libraries of Karachi, Pakistan and more. In Burnley’s Thompson Park, Super Slow Way host Reetu Satar’s film Harano Sur (Lost Tune), which poses questions about disappearing cultural traditions. Read our review.

Mike Pinnington

Images and media, from top: BFI trailer for Pandora’s Box; Film still From Asif Kapadia’s Diego Maradona; Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21; Airspace Gallery Public Me & You poster; Sonic Yootha The Real Thing; Pandora’s Box film still

A new presentation of Biennial works at a pair of venues in Lancashire triggers fond memories while foregrounding urgent cultural issues, finds Siobhán Forshaw…

When we were kids, our mum used the local library as a kind of crèche for my sister and me. She would drop us there after school, before rushing back to finish her shift stitching uniforms at the factory, or sometimes for an hour on Saturday mornings to get her hair done in town. The children’s section of Burnley Library was a magical place. It had great big mobiles hanging from the ceiling – fantastic creatures flying overhead – and squashy beanbags leaking little polystyrene bits over the carpet. It was a haven, where I knew the names of the librarians and where I felt safe and in charge – it was my special place.

Burnley Library is still open, but across Lancashire, dozens of others have been forced to close in the wake of punitive austerity cuts; 2016 alone saw the closure of twenty-six libraries. The survival of such cultural sanctuaries is at the heart of three video works by Madiha Aijaz, currently installed in Nelson Library as part of the Liverpool Biennial’s strategic touring programme. Aijaz, who died earlier this year at just thirty-eight, presented three meditative and gentle works devoted to libraries in Karachi. They allow us to eavesdrop on conversations about language erasure and reluctant amalgamation whilst the camera flows across the untidy paraphernalia that keeps the libraries going. We watch kettles boiling and papers blown away by cooling fans, whilst we listen to cheerful bickering over the correct interpretation of a particular poetry verse; a funny story told about the habit of Pakistani families to speak to the family dog in English; a lament over the gradual replacement of Urdu with English during television commercials.

Aijaz’s pieces are presented by In-Situ, an organisation that produces contemporary art in response to the people, places and heritage of Pendle. They worked with local community group Mums 2 Mums, who selected Aijaz’s work and who took part in engagement workshops around the commission. Chatting with some of the mums at the opening, they spoke about the meanings of cultural authenticity and aura, particularly about messages they choose to pass on to their children and grandchildren. One phrase that repeatedly came up in response to Aijaz’s work was ‘nah idaar kay nah udar kay’, which means ‘neither here nor there’ – a reflection on the painful reality that when visiting Pakistan, you will be known as a ‘Londoner’ (despite your Lancastrian accent), whilst in your home country, you will not be regarded as truly British. This resonated for me in the recent case of Shamima Begum, the east Londoner who was born, educated and radicalized in Britain, now permanently exiled by a British state that might not find it so easy to remove such rights from a white citizen.

Aijaz’s three videos, nestled between stacks of books in Polish and Urdu, displays about the old textile industry and local Northern dialect, speak to the vitality of libraries as places of connection. Looking around, Nelson Library is host to older gents reading the paper, teens revising for exams, parents reading with their children. When these places disappear, so too do the prospects for mixed communities to share space.

Reetu Sattar’s film Lost Tune is presented by Super Slow Way in the pavilion at Thompson Park in Burnley. She will be taking up a residency with Super Slow Way later in the summer, with further engagement workshops planned for local people. Her piece has a more theatrical edge: musicians sit cross-legged one atop the other on a large scaffolding structure, solemnly playing the harmonium, an instrument that holds deep cultural significance for several of Bangladesh’s minority communities, and which is under threat of decline, in part because of cultural constraints exerted by a controlling state authority. The piece seems to relate the loss of a musical practice to Sattar’s sense of the erasure of free expression in Bangladesh. The scaffolding seems to present the structure of a raga through the logic of a construction that requires foundations and walls before it can have a roof.

It is a great wash of loud, dense sound, which swells and bursts into blasts of bright tones from four shehnais. Within the pavilion space it is imposing and confrontational, and you feel small before it – an inversion of the cultural pressures weighing down on the harmonium, which in Bangladesh is practiced in smaller and smaller numbers. Sattar has described the work as deliberately ‘monotonous’, and it is an unyielding work to witness – a refusal of vulnerability; a reclamation in the face of cultural loss. I was grateful for a presentation from ‘Haych’ (Hussnain Hanif), a local artist who contextualized the piece by explaining the seven notes that build a raga, and giving a generous and full-throated performance over the video. Songs are bodily things, carried on the breath by lungs, mouths and tongues, and Haych’s performance helped me to make a deeper connection with Sattar’s work.

In both installations, we see ruminations on cultural precarity and preservation. Presented within community spaces, they take on new significance, drawing relevance between Karachi and a small Northern town; between the loss of cultural practices in Bangladesh and concerns in British-Bangladeshi communities about inclusion and belonging. It is such a great thing to extend the lives of these pieces beyond the Biennial and into spaces where they may resonate most strongly, but where the communities frequently lack the opportunity to engage with such works in contexts that actually make sense. We are seeing this approach develop elsewhere in institutional programming: the touring of a Gentileschi masterpiece into women’s prisons and girls’ schools has created opportunities for a greater understanding of how the cultural industries work. In the face of ever-narrowing cultural provision outside of major cities, these programmes are crucial: let’s hope it proves to be more than a trend.

Siobhán Forshaw

Madiha Aijaz and Reetu Sattar continue until 30 June at In-Situ and Super Slow Way respectively

Images from top: Reetu Sattar, Haranu Sur (Lost Tune), 2017-2018, Image courtesy Sayed Asif Mahmud; Madiha Aijaz, Memorial for the Lost Pages (film still), 2018

“I wanted critical feedback that would challenge me to produce the best writing I can.” Denise Courcoux on her time on The Double Negative’s inaugural Fellowship, how it has affected her writing and raised her sights…

Being selected for The Double Negative’s inaugural Fellowship last summer was hugely exciting for me. I had been writing about art for five years, on and off. I spend a lot of my free time visiting exhibitions. Going away and researching them further, and reflecting on them critically, enriches the whole experience for me. My reviews had previously been published on a few cultural websites; I valued my writing being given a platform, and the thought that it might be useful to or appreciated by readers. Looking back over my application for the Fellowship, I wrote that I was ready to take my writing ‘to the next level’. I definitely wanted to try and professionalise my practice, and broaden the outlets I write for – but most of all, I wanted critical feedback that would challenge me to produce the best writing I can.

The calibre of mentors in the Fellowship was brilliant, and a little daunting: a set of internationally renowned writers for publications like Frieze, ArtReview and Ocula. I was delighted to be paired with writer and curator Ellen Mara De Wachter. We share a background in galleries and museums, and I admire her writing. I’d also quoted her in my dissertation – something I was too shy to mention! We agreed a schedule of monthly catch-ups; ahead of each I would email her some new writing for feedback. Ellen’s comments were always useful and thorough, from the nitty gritty of grammar to the overarching aims of a piece.

Receiving regular, detailed feedback was incredibly useful, and something I’d not had before. Ellen pulled no punches in her critiques, but was always constructive and encouraging. Of the many useful tips I received, my main takeaways were to make my descriptions as accurate as possible, and to get to the heart of what is interesting about the subject; why should the reader care? These might sound obvious, but they are difficult to achieve well and take a lot of work – which means editing and re-editing. Ellen encouraged me not to be afraid of putting my feelings into my writing, and we talked about confidence. She also shared practical advice on things like payment rates and how to pitch to publications, as well as offering some wonderful reading recommendations.

Most of our discussions were conducted over the phone, and I looked forward to settling down with a brew and my laptop every month to talk writing. We also had an introductory meeting in Liverpool with TDN’s founders, Laura and Mike, and I paid a return visit to Ellen in London last September. We spent a great afternoon gallery-hopping in East London, including viewing the stunning Earwitness Theatre at Chisenhale Gallery, for which Lawrence Abu Hamdan has recently been nominated for the Turner Prize. Our monthly conversations meant I kept producing new writing, something I’d often found difficult to balance alongside a full-time job. During the Fellowship I wrote three exhibition reviews, edited an existing article on social class in the arts, and experimented with some creative memoir-style writing.

Most significantly for me, I also produced an essay for Present Tense, the forthcoming book from The Double Negative, featuring new writing by mentors and mentees involved in the Fellowship. We were asked to reflect on Liverpool a decade on from its year as European Capital of Culture; I chose to examine two of the city’s public artworks, by Barbara Hepworth and Richard Wilson. I loved the process of researching the piece and writing to a brief, and having critical feedback from both Ellen and TDN helped me to hone a piece of writing that I’m really proud of. Having my work published in a physical book will be an amazing outcome, and the designs I’ve seen look fantastic. A Kickstarter was launched to support the production costs,  and I was overwhelmed by the support shown to the project, especially by other emerging writers.

Each of the writers who applied to the Fellowship also had the opportunity to attend a writing ‘boot camp’ with Jennifer Higgie, Editorial Director of Frieze. This was an inspiring and focused day on the technicalities of writing about art, and professional tips which really helped demystify the world of art publications and what they are looking for. The Fellowship exceeded my expectations in offering an array of unique and valuable opportunities to progress my writing. If I could change anything, I would have liked to have met up with the other Fellows [Ellie Wiseman and Jacob Bolton, pictured with Denise, above] more to share our experiences – it was great to see their new writing appearing throughout the process.

Since completing the Fellowship in January, I have already had a couple of paid writing commissions. I have written about Liverpool Biennial’s touring programme, and I was approached by artist Rebecca Chesney to report on an event about art and class, a great opportunity to delve further into an issue that is important to me. I have also made my first pitches to a national print publication – something I wouldn’t have dreamt of doing before starting the programme. I am determined to keep up the momentum I have gained from the Fellowship and, above all, keep writing.

Denise Courcoux

Denise’s essay, Finding Richard and Barbara: A Sculpture Walk, features in Present Tense, a forthcoming book from The Double Negative

Main image: The Double Negative Fellows 2018/19 (l-r: Ellie Wiseman, Jacob Bolton, Denise Courcoux)

Read more about the book, and the authors’ journey through The Double Negative Fellowship.

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 – An Accidental Studio 9pm @ FACT Liverpool – £7.70

Life of Brian, The Long Good Friday, Time Bandits, Withnail and I – HandMade Films, a production company formed in 1978 by George Harrison and his business partner Denis O’Brien, was behind many of the British film industry’s biggest and best received hits. With insight from key figures, An Accidental Studio charts their ups and downs, with a prerecorded Q&A featuring Sir Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Ray Cooper, hosted by actor and broadcaster Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Tuesday – The Coathangers 7pm @ Arts Club, Liverpool – £9

It’s a good week for live music fans in Liverpool, kicked off tonight by the “rowdy, ramshackle, and infectious” garage rock of this Atlanta, Georgia three piece formed in 2006. After a break last year, they’re back and touring their latest long-player, The Devil You Know. The release – met with glowing reviews – responds to and is about “our stories and life experiences, giving up the devil we know”, says guitarist Julia Kugel.

Wednesday – Kehinde Andrews Talk 6pm @ Tate Liverpool – £5

Anybody who has wandered, prepared or otherwise, into the ground floor Wolfson gallery at Tate Liverpool these last few weeks, will surely have come out changed somewhat. For, they will have experienced the seven-minute burst of choppy editing and home truths that is Arthur Jafa’s 2016 film Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death. Tonight, professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University and author of Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century, Kehinde Andrews responds to Jafa’s sucker punch of a film.   

WoWFEST, Liverpool – Prices Vary

Liverpool’s impressively programmed literary festival is back, and gets off to a bang this evening with author Will Self’s keynote speech responding to this year’s theme of Where Are We Now? Tomorrow, meanwhile, sees an exhibition launch at the Central Library marking the centenary of the 1919 Race Riots. With a packed schedule of talks and events running through May, just some of our picks include Common People – Class in the Margins in Writing and Publishing; LOWBORN: Kerry Hudson Book Launch and Dayglo: The Poly Styrene Story.

Exhibition Opening: I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker 6pm @ ICA, London – FREE

Novelist, playwright, essayist, postmodernist and sex-positive feminist writer, where to start with Kathy Acker? This question seems to be the departure point and guiding rationale of I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker, the first UK exhibition dedicated to this “still-unfolding cultural force”. Described on the website as “polyvocal”, the exhibition is structured around and responds to fragments of Acker’s writing, complemented and augmented by works of other artists and writers. Also including audio and video documentation of Acker’s performances from her personal archive, the show promises to be rich and ripe for the unpicking.

Thursday – Output Open 2 6pm @ Output Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Last month marked the first anniversary of Output Gallery. A welcome addition to Liverpool’s  cultural landscape, its remit is to platform artists based in or from the city. Tonight’s second annual Output Open brings together the work of Claire Holtaway, Nneka Cummins, John Elcock, Zhuozhang Li, Paul Mellor, Gold Akanbi, Grace Edwards, Sumuyya Khader, Josie Jenkins and Sophie Green “to showcase the great amount of creative activity that is happening locally”.

Friday – Sound City, Liverpool – £75/£55

A smart, discernible shift in programming has seen Liverpool Sound City move to emphasise emerging talent as the mainstay of its lineup. Alongside acts such as Loyle Carner, Mabel and The Magic Gang, expect industry chat and insight from the likes of Nothin But The Music’s Yaw Owusu, Amelie Bonvalot from Domino Records, and BBC Introducing’s Huw Stephens.

Saturday – Exhibition Closing: Aslan Gaisumov and Janice Kerbel @ Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre – FREE

On display at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre as part of the Liverpool Biennial touring programme, Aslan Gaisumov’s Keicheyuhea, and Janice Kerbel closes this week. The former deals with the fall out felt by Chechen people, displaced by the Soviets towards the end of the Second World War, while Kerbel’s Fight silkscreens depict the violence of and in words. Catch it while you can. Read our review.

Sunday – Sounds from the Other City – £25

“Salford’s celebration of new music, performance and art,” Sounds from the Other City this year celebrates its QUINDECENNIAL – its fifteenth anniversary to you and me. Wisely scheduled prior to May Bank holiday, the lineup is chock full of acts flying under the radar. If you’re not au fait with many of those fresh names, look out for Sneaks, Withered Hand, The Orielles and Working Men’s Club.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media from top: An Accidental Studio trailer; still from Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016); Kathy Acker; still from Aslan Gaisumov’s Keicheyuhea (2017)

On display at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre as part of the Liverpool Biennial touring programme, Bob Dickinson finds works by two artists each responding to the memory of violence…

Some artworks demand close reading. Sandwiched between the two main upstairs galleries at Bury Art Museum right now you will find two of them, courtesy of Liverpool Biennial’s touring programme, and both concern acts of violence. One is text-based, while the other is a film featuring a woman’s face in a bleak, dramatic landscape. The film, Keicheyuhea (2017), by Aslan Gaisumov, records his grandmother’s return to the site of her former home in the mountains of Chechnya, where, 73 years earlier, towards the end of the Second World War, she and her family were displaced by Soviet forces.

What we see when she arrives in the back of a four-by-four vehicle driven by the artist, is her immediate reaction. “Hail, place!” she cries, climbing a steep hill, as the camera joins her alongside. For several minutes, we are her companions, sharing intimate closeup shots of the lines around her eyes and mouth, as she searches, stares, and wonders, while we try to imagine what only she can remember.  “The Russians came and told us to leave in fifteen minutes,” she says, “They took us to Grozny… there they put us in cattle trucks and took us away.”

Something paradoxical takes place here. What we see and what she knows are so different from one another that we become increasingly curious as to why she, the elderly woman, bent with age, but still strong, is so baffled and amazed by what she’s returned to. The sense of a place “where many people used to live” is remote, because now, as she also observes, “There are no wild animals anymore, nothing to see…” When she spots two stones in the distance, she realises they mark the area where her own house used to be. But we don’t see the two stones, we just see her looking at them, distancing us further. Memory and loss are as closely interweaved as the fingers held tight behind the woman’s back, as she walks, stands, and mourns without shedding a tear.

Confronting you as you walk away from this is Fight (2018), a series of four posters by Canadian artist Janice Kerbel. Each as high as a human, the posters use silkscreen-printed words to describe a choreographed fight that originally involved twelve unarmed participants. Every move, every impact, appears in words on a poster at the height it happened in relation to someone’s body. We see no humans here, but Kerbel’s use of words communicates bodily collision and interaction forcefully. Using lettering in different fonts, and in uppercase as well as lower, simple words like “stomp” “hairpull” and “gouge,” grouped together as they are here, all suddenly acquire a deeply unpleasant quality.  Words frequently overlap and are sometimes printed backwards, recording the way a fight breaks out, twists and turns, uses up energy and emotion, and collapses eventually from pain and exhaustion, necessitating rest and silence before breaking out again.

Reading these words as you walk from poster to poster is like rerunning the fight, of course. The more you read, the more you are also being battered by words. And in continuing to read, the more you also feel like a potential participant. I found myself asking: do I want to see this fight through to the end? Would I want to see any fight through to the end? Fights, of the physical sort, are not pleasant, but as this artwork warns, they can draw you in. And, as both these artworks remind us, the memory of violence goes on to disturb.

Bob Dickinson

Aslan Gaisumov’s Keicheyuhea (2017), and Janice Kerbel’s Fight (2018) continue at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre until 4 May as part of the Liverpool Biennial touring programme

Janice Kerbel exhibition images courtesy Rob Battersby; Keicheyuhea film still courtesy the artist

The Liverpool Biennial touring programme arrived at Leigh’s Turnpike gallery recently, with Mohamed Bourouissa’s Horse Day. Denise Courcoux assesses how a change of venue and star-billing can make all the difference to how a work is considered…

Hidden in plain sight, Horse Day was a gem in the last Liverpool Biennial. Spirited, engaging and sometimes funny, I spent a few minutes enjoying Mohamed Bourouissa’s film before the compulsion kicked in to ‘tick off’ the rest of the works at FACT, and then head off to get another venue ‘done’. This is the downside of art festivals for a completist. The sheer volume of stuff means some works get crowded out or underappreciated; not only physically but also in publicity, where the excitement of a new (and underwhelming) installation by Agnès Varda at FACT, as well as a new commission by Bourouissa, meant this pre-existing work from 2014-15 was a footnote.

It’s wonderful, then, to have the chance to revisit Horse Day at The Turnpike as part of the Biennial’s touring programme. At the end of a fly-postered corridor advertising a ‘Horse Tuning Expo’, the video installation documenting this curious event is projected onto two large screens. The reflection of the moving images on the dark painted floor, and an orange glow from an unseen source behind them, create a sense of immersion in an expansive space.

The film follows the inhabitants of the Fletcher Street district in Philadelphia. It is an impoverished area, bearing the signs of decades of neglect and unemployment: ramshackle housing, low abandoned buildings, stretches of parched wasteland. These bleak signifiers are gloriously interrupted by the sight of horses being ridden through the streets. Defying expectations, these American riders are not wearing cowboy hats, or even riding helmets; they are young black men in their everyday streetwear.

Fletcher Street is home to long-established stables that have survived against the odds, and Algerian artist Bourouissa worked with these urban riders to create the celebratory Horse Day documented here. The dual-screen film presents different aspects of the community, often pairing scenes of purposeful preparation or conversation with fluid shots of riders in full, free flow.

The cultivation of individual appearance is a recurring theme in this short film. Elaborate and ingenious homemade costumes were created for the animals with great care by participants; old compact discs combine into a mirror ball-style cape, and a white horse’s prominent ribcage is outlined with the rest of its skeleton in black paint. The trophies awarded at the expo are similarly homespun from scrap metal, though taking part rather than winning is the spirit of the day; one rider wonders incredulously to his companion, “If everyone wins what kind of competition could it be?”

Men on horseback are synonymous with American iconography of the Wild West, but this community has created its own mythology around riding, entirely independent of the weight of history. One interviewee, visibly proud of his riding prowess, states emphatically, “I never dress like a cowboy, never […] I feel like a horse man.” He chooses his clothing to match the animal he’s riding; brown, silver, white. The gulf between these horse men and the cowboys of old is illustrated as one of the youths asks whether the swaggering Western movie actor John Wayne was white or black. As he struggles to control a pony, his friend shoots wryly back at him, “John Wayne don’t do shit like this!”

Bourouissa captures the camaraderie and resilience found in life on the margins. The value of community traditions in nurturing a sense of identity and place is clear, as is the resourcefulness and creativity needed to keep them relevant. The choice of The Turnpike for this new presentation of Horse Day is apt. When it reopened two years ago, its Director set out a vision of programming art that would chime with the residents of Leigh – a post-industrial town with its share of struggles and a resolutely independent, community-minded outlook. Horse Day undoubtedly benefits from the space and profile afforded it at The Turnpike but, more interestingly, it also gains an added layer of resonance here.

Denise Courcoux

Mohamed Bourouissa: Horse Day is at The Turnpike, Leigh, until 25 March as part of the Liverpool Biennial touring programme

Images courtesy Rob Battersby