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

Monday – Exhibitions Continue: @ The Atkinson, Southport – FREE

A trio of shows currently grace Southport’s Atkinson. The Magic of Middle-earth, brings together all manner of creative responses to Tolkien’s opus, including memorabilia, paintings, sculptures, and Lego. Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s I Love You Southport finds the Sefton-born artist showcasing new works; and the gallery’s collection marks its 150th anniversary with a new display bringing together works from the 17th century to the present day. Something for everyone.

From the Archive: Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Merseyside Burman Empire

Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE

The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial continues 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 days/times.

Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial: BEDROCK Review

Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE

Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the well-established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as ever. 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 days/times.

Tuesday – Exhibition Continues: Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? @ Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno – FREE

This major exhibition, commissioned by The National Gallery, takes as its inspiration the hiding of works of art for safekeeping during the Second World War in a disused Snowdonia slate mine. Featuring works and co-curated by Turner Prize-winning artist, Jeremy Deller, Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? also includes new commissions by early career Welsh artists, Esyllt Angharad Lewis, Gweni Llwyd, Lewis Prosser, Llyr Evans and Sadia Pineda Hameed.

News From Home 5.50pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

When Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was voted Sight & Sound magazine’s greatest film in its 2022 poll, it marked a major shake-up for not just the poll, but also those names synonymous with the award. A welcome turn of events, it opens the door to programming that brings audiences into contact with a, perhaps, less familiar name. Such is the case with this week’s screening of News From Home, Akerman’s avant-garde documentary, which finds the director ‘exiled’ in New York, reading letters sent to her from her mum back in Europe.

Wednesday – Shallow Grave 8pm (and 5.45pm Thursday) @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

A trio of flatmates (baby Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccleston) come into an unexpected windfall in director Danny Boyle’s 1994 debut Shallow Grave – and come face to face with the consequences of greed and betrayal.

Thursday – Opening: Manchester International Festival 2025: Dream Differently  @ Aviva Studios/Venues across the city – £Various

Framed this year as a ‘leap into the unknown’, 2025′s MIF is, nevertheless, the usual reliable mix of family friendly and aficionado-centred visual art, performance, spectacle, music and more. Everyone will be talking about Eric Cantona, whose artistic collaboration with Ryan Gander features in the huge group exhibition, Football City, Art United. Our highlights include contemporary ballet reimagining Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (starring John Grant and Ed Watson); and the first international solo exhibition of indigenous northern Peruvian artist and activist, Santiago Yahuarcani, whose narrative paintings are “rooted in the legacy of my ancestors, those who saw the universe not as something to conquer, but to revere.”

Liverpool Biennial 2025: Drop-in Weekly Tea and Talk Tours 2pm 20 Jordan Street – FREE

This does what it says on the tin tour offers a way to ease yourself in to the Biennial if all those sites, artists and the theme itself prove a bit overwhelming – it can be a lot to take in. If our experience of this edition’s Biennial volunteers is anything to go by, you’ll be in safe, informative, hands.

Moolakii Club: Silent Film Soundtracks 7pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £7

Obscure, avant-garde early silent and experimental film set to contemporary electronica. A compelling proposition.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Hollywood, New York, Colwyn Bay @ Oriel Colwyn, Colwyn Bay – FREE

Championing photography in Wales since 2012, Oriel Colwyn’s latest opening, from sometime Tatler photographer Dafydd Jones, coincides with American Independence Day. Working in the US with the likes of Vanity Fair, Jones captured the best – and worst –  of US society, from Hollywood to Wall Street and beyond. Catch Jones in conversation at the gallery on Saturday @ 1pm.

More photography from the Big Apple

Saturday – Apocalypse Now: Final Cut 12.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, now has a Final Cut – restored from the original negative by the man himself. Coppola’s preferred version of his Vietnam War epic, this edit pushes its run-time over the three-hour mark and can be considered definitive. Want to make a day of it? Documentary Hearts of Darkness, chronicling Coppola’s on-set travails, follows at 4.30pm.

Sunday – The Piano Teacher 4.15pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35

Even if you’re somewhat familiar with the challenging, mercurial oeuvre of Austrian director, Michael Haneke, his 2001 film, The Piano Teacher, could well catch you unawares. Adapted from Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 psychosexual novel of the same name, it stars Isabelle Huppert as the repressed, hemmed in music professor of the title. A brutal, fascinating, and ultimately destructive character study of a woman pushing for sexual agency.

Mike Pinnington/Laura Robertson

Images from top: Football City, Art United. MIF25. Matt Fox, The Magic Of Middle-earth 2025, The Atkinson, photo by Dave Jones. Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? at Mostyn Gallery. Ewan McGregor, in director Danny Boyle’s 1994 debut Shallow Grave (still). Dachshunds fighting over doggy canapés. Iris Love (holding Just Desserts) and Brooke Astor (holding Dolly Astor) at a dachshund party, Barbetta restaurant. Manhattan, 12 February 1990: Dafydd Jones, Hollywood, New York, Colwyn Bay exhibition, Oriel Colwyn 2025

“What would Liverpool be without it?” On the eve of Liverpool Biennial 2025, C James Fagan ponders his sometimes complex, on-going relationship with the UK’s largest festival of contemporary art…

It’s a Biennial year, folks! What does that mean, other than that for three months, Liverpool hosts the largest contemporary arts festival in the UK? Looking at what’s in store in this 2025 edition, themed BEDROCK, I find myself thinking about previous editions. In doing so, I realised that the Biennial – the first of which was in 1998 – coincided with my growing interest in and deeper engagement with contemporary art.

I have experienced the Biennial as a visitor, volunteer, and as a writer, having written reviews of previous editions, and having been commissioned by the Biennial. My writings on the subject have appeared on this very website. I’ve navigated several editions by now, so have seen its victories and its failures, and a lot of art.

I have to admit, this isn’t a critical piece; it’s more in the style of a rambling memoir. Apologies if there’s an ‘old man yelling at clouds’ vibe, that’s not my intent. It’s just, looking back, things get conflated, the details lose their definition. That also means that I jump around a bit. What I thought were pieces from different Biennials came from the same edition for instance. But each Biennial has a different effect on you. Unsurprising given the number of artists involved.

One of the first artists that sprang to mind was N.I.C.J.O.B. (from 2002), who created a series of videos featuring video clips edited to create music from the sound effects used in the original source film. A jingle if you will, because N.I.C.J.O.B.’s videos were in every Biennial venue, providing a crashing, banging welcome into each space. Perhaps its mix of repetition and ubiquity meant it sticks in the mind.

Was that the same year of a show in an abandoned church, or chapel? Was it the Biennial where one venue had a van hanging out of it? Which makes me think of Do-Ho Suh‘s house dropped between two buildings in 2010, somewhere on London Road; and the big red house that played ABBA on the riverfront. That was probably 2006 as I recall making a trip from university in Wales (where I was studying at the time) to see it.

One of the key elements of the Biennial is how it gets you to rediscover the city. Making you visit places you ordinarily wouldn’t. Finding lost spaces, or spaces about to be lost, given a stay of execution. Like the year it took over the soon to be demolished Post Office sorting office behind Lime Street station. My main recollection was that it was exhausting walking around those cavernous spaces; then seeing a huge black inflated pillow-shaped installation, and realising putting a big thing in a big space means a loss of a sense of scale.

Some of the abiding memories aren’t just of the artworks, then, it’s the spaces they occupy. Like the sorting office, for instance. Seeing the remains of strange equipment and of its former workforce – graffiti, work rotas, sheets of stamps left on the walls. Or, more recently, in that basement space where the glass panel on the door reads ‘Kommadant’ (the leavings of a film set – the city mediated by yet another narrative).

In 2010, it was the then recently vacated Rapid Hardware store. Walking past empty showrooms, past empty window displays, I recall finding a set of aeroplane seats in front of the hyperactive video work of Ryan Trecartin, echoing in the largely empty spaces. While one of the strengths of the Biennial is its use of such non-art spaces, the ratio between art and space can fall in the favour of the latter.

The willingness to trek between artworks and venues, though, is part and parcel of the Biennial. It is a city-wide event – walking the city is the way one engages with the Biennial, and vice versa. I remember trekking to a hotel on the edge of the city centre only to find the installation I was looking for never took place. Then there was the year I walked for about a mile along the river looking for a ‘light installation’ only to discover it was simply a huge question mark on the outside of the boat shed. The one I had been looking at for about twenty minutes!

Is this what the Biennial does: put contemporary art right in view? Like, when Yoko Ono, maybe one of the most well-known artists outside the – let’s remember quite narrow niche of the – artworld, showed her work, My Mommy Is Beautiful, across the city. Both artwork and promotion for the Biennial, it featured a breast and pubis on banners throughout the city. Does this work somehow reflect an element of the Biennial, that it’s at once highly visible and yet isn’t widely known, outside the usual places?

So much of the Biennial exists in the public realm. You have Ugo Rondinone’s Liverpool Mountain on the Royal Albert Dock. The brightly coloured rocks have become a favourite spot for a photo, but does it help raise the profile of the Biennial? Do people make a connection between the sculpture and the city’s art festival? Does it even matter if they do?

Is it engagement by stealth? Putting people in conversation with contemporary art without them realising it? Throughout the city there is evidence of the Biennial, and Biennials past. They’ve only recently taken down the Betty Woodman fountain; the binoculars which let you spy on the town hall are still there. Can you still see the circle cut into the side of a building that was a much-celebrated Richard Wilson piece?

Is this how the Biennial relates to the city? It’s long been a criticism of the Biennial that it doesn’t really relate to the city at all; perhaps it’s time, instead, to think about how it has become part of the city’s fabric in small and unexpected ways. Through this ramble across Biennials past, I’ve begun to consider my relationship with it.

While it’s hardly immune to criticism, then, what would Liverpool be without it? Certainly a little less exciting. Where else do you get an art festival on this scale with the time in which to see it? Where else can you be exposed to this many artists and not have to go to London – or further afield? Ok: given the amount of artists, it is always going to be a mixed bag. But the likelihood of seeing something you’ll remember (however vaguely), perhaps even love, is high.

Take Torkwase Dyson’s haunting and beautiful installation Liquid A Place, which formed part of Tate Liverpool’s 2023 Biennial display. How else, where else, would I have encountered such an artist and their work?

As the 2025 Biennial approaches, I look forward to seeing it. What – who – will I discover? What will make a mark on the city? What ghosts will be left behind?

C James Fagan

Liverpool Biennial 2025 runs 7 June–14 September

Read our Liverpool Biennial 2025 preview

Read more articles by C James Fagan

Images, from top: Turning the Place Over, Richard Wilson, 2007, courtesy Liverpool Biennial. Alexandra Wolkowicz; Copperas Hill; Liverpool Mountain, Ugo Rondinone, 2018; Liquid a Place, Torkwase Dyson, 2021. Liverpool Biennial 2023 at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy of Liverpool Biennial. Photography by Mark McNulty 

Taking in climate change at Helsinki Biennial, diversity at the Ateneum, and visiting contrasting new galleries in an art school and bar toilets (!), Mike Pinnington’s return to Finland’s capital city is a timely reminder of how the arts are valued by the world’s happiest people… 

We’re at a table in the cosy waterfront setting of Wellamo, a tiny restaurant whose raison d’etre is its commitment to using only Finnish/Nordic ingredients. We are, therefore, taking the opportunity to enjoy some home-grown beers and wines. The place is packed with cheerful locals and whispering couples; it feels like the perfect spot to celebrate an occasion, or have a date.

This isn’t our first time in Helsinki: we’ve been lucky enough to visit several times, working with artists and institutions on text in all its forms – from gallery interpretation to artist statements. Owing to the global pandemic, though, it’s been a while. Soaking in the warm atmosphere and smells emanating from Wellamo’s kitchen, it feels good to be back.

We’re here to meet with Arja Miller, director of Helsinki Art Museum (known to all simply as HAM). We chat about the parallels and differences between art scenes in the UK and Finland, and, more specifically, between Liverpool and Helsinki; during our visit, each is host to a Biennial. And, coincidentally, Helsinki’s festival had been curated by Joasia Krysa, Professor of Exhibition Research and Head of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design.

We discuss some of the artists who have made the trip from exhibiting in Liverpool over to Helsinki, such as augmented world-builders Keiken Collective (Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos and Tanya Cruz), and Danielle Braithwaite Shirley, who foregrounds Black Trans lives using video game installations – all who’ve shown at FACT Liverpool. Talk turns to commissioning, and Finland’s Percent for Art principle, whereby one percent of any construction project’s budget is designated to acquiring or funding works of art. UK readers won’t be terribly surprised to hear that Britain has never had such a policy, meaning that it’s up to other parties to stump up the money. It casts new light on cities like Liverpool’s appetite and commitment – never mind financial clout – for public art.

As outsiders, it can’t help but reinforce our sense that this part of the world thinks differently about itself – and its citizens – as Finland once again tops the UN’s World Happiness Report (which takes into account health, income and social support). We enjoy the rest of the evening chatting casually about art; we’re in good company after all.

Later in the week, we are reminded again of this sense of responsibility to citizens when meeting with the City of Helsinki‘s Acting Cultural Director, Mari Männistö. One of the initiatives she is most proud of being involved with is Culture Kids, a scheme whereby each child is invited, free of charge, to two events per year, by an assigned organisation who acts as a cultural guardian for that child.

Coming from a country in which most galleries and museums feel as though they pick up the slack for, rather than work in tandem with, local and national government when it comes to arts education and engagement, we can’t help but be impressed, but also dismayed. We reflect on how obvious and beneficial Culture Kids is – and wonder why similar government-led provision isn’t happening back in the UK.

Given such benefits, it comes as little surprise to find a smattering of English speakers in this city – and not just the bilingual locals. At the cavernous Kuva/Tila gallery, Academy of Fine Arts Mylly, University of the Arts Helsinki’s new exhibition space for students and staff, we find Irish artist and lecturer in Contemporary Art Practice, Suzanne Mooney, a resident since 2018. Over coffee, we chat about Mooney’s undergraduates, their expectations, and the question of staying in the city post-graduation to contribute to the scene here, or moving abroad for different experiences. Artist and academic both, Mooney has seen both sides. Certainly, the provision and opportunity for those studying here at the academy is ample; light-filled artist studios, cutting-edge teaching resources, and a dedicated modern gallery, all contained under the roof of this purpose-built space.

That evening we meet with a colleague of Mooney’s, and our friend from Manchester: Professor of Fine Art Pedagogy at UniArts, Magnus Quaife (who, despite the name, is not Swedish). As a modest bar crawl ensues, we take in some of Magnus’ – and our – favourite places to grab a beer in Helsinki, including trendy dive bar SalamaNation, home of Quaife’s new in-house gallery space, Suihkulähde. Translated as Fountain in Finnish, and perfectly reflecting Quaife’s sense of humour, it is, of course, in the accessible toilet. Showing only one artwork at any given time, it is at once a nod to art history via Marcel Duchamp, and an exploration of where we – and the public at large – might give a few minutes of our full attention to a print or photograph… or even the soap (by Jack Brown).

Amid the flurry of meetings, and the odd beverage, we make sure to carve out time to grasp more of the city’s rich arts and culture offer. Next morning, not too worse for wear, we head in the direction of a gallery that should be on every visitor’s radar: home of the national collection, the Ateneum. A Neo-Renaissance beauty that is a stone’s throw from the similarly striking train station, it holds great riches spanning Finland’s famed art history.

The major draw of its displays has recently been subject to a rehang, and outgoing director Marja Sakari (who will be replaced this year by Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff). “We took change as our starting point,” Sakari is quoted on the wall; “Our key concerns were the stories the collection can tell us today, and how it could truly be a collection for the whole nation.”

The sections – Art and Power, The Age of Nature, Images of a People and Modern Life – bring focus to the story, one that takes in and reflects not only the past, but also the beginnings of Finnish art, and artists’ reckoning with a tumultuous present and unpredictable future. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, known for his illustrations of Finnish national epic the Kalevala, and luminaries such as Helene Schjerfbeck and Hugo Simberg remain towering figures. Whatever your taste, there is something for you. There is always work to be done, however, especially in better reflecting a diversifying society that is barely 100 years old – and the spectre represented by a new coalition government that counts among its number the anti-immigration Finns Party (formerly known as True Finns).

Art isn’t created in a vacuum; while the romantic stereotype of it being an endeavour of solitude persists – better that the muse can strike – ideas and inspiration also spring forth in company. In the name of this and more, that evening we head to the offices of Laura Köönikkä, an independent curator, mentor and driving force behind the Finnish Art Agency. The occasion is one of simply coming together with those who might not ordinarily do so; the artists squeezed, sardine like, into a room of their peers.

Conversations, common concerns – and, no doubt, gossip – are soon animatedly shared. My multiple visits to Finland have afforded me the chance to meet many contemporary artists. This is something I deeply appreciate: to speak about how they present their work, hear about their wider practice, their influences and experiences, their hopes and expectations. And the evening presents a great opportunity to reconnect with some familiar faces. It’s genuinely lovely to see Camilla Vuorenmaa and Anu Kauhaniemi, two very different painters, whose careers I’ve followed since our first meetings on previous trips.

Not a natural conversationalist, however, I eventually take the chance to sit down. But I soon find myself chatting away with Kreetta Järvenpää, and I’m so glad I did, for she’s a photographer capable of incredible things. Her studio photographs, which must be seen to be believed, look like old master paintings of flowers. Later, I talk with Sami Havia, who brings the worlds of abstraction and figuration together in his questioning works on paper, and meet the recently crowned Young Artist Of The Year, sculptor Eetu Huhtela. All of which goes to demonstrate the richly textured make-up of Helsinki’s contemporary scene; it’s one we’re always so happy to be reacquainted with.

Next day, we head to the harbour to catch the ferry over to Vallisaari – one of Helsinki’s 330 islands which between 1918 and 2012 was under the purview of the Finnish Defence Forces. Islands have long been used by authors as a literary device; set apart from the fixed reality of the mainland by choppy waters, they readily lend themselves to flights of fancy.

Helsinki Biennial has leaned into this, staging the festival of contemporary art on Vallisaari for a second time, with the title New Directions May Emerge. This iteration takes its theme from anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s assertion that “As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge.” It’s a thoughtful departure point, one with the intention of exploring how, even at this relatively late stage of proceedings, “we might find new [and hopefully better] ways of living in, and understanding, the world.”

Traversing Vallisaari’s woodland paths and coastline – which on our sun-kissed visit can’t help but be the star of the show – we encounter some well-selected works that enrich this idea of mutual worlds. A favourite work is by Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė (who has just been awarded the Ars Fennica prize). Her ‘eco sci-fi thriller’ Hypoxia, a multi-channel installation, weaves together traditional storytelling and the widely reported ‘discovery’ of an alien craft in the ocean, to consider humanity’s impact on the Baltic Sea, confront ecological catastrophe, and muse on the anthropocene.

Later, back on dry land, we head to HAM for the rest o9f the Biennial, where things are no less fantastical – in fact, it’s almost as if a mythological creature has escaped the island to lie in wait for us there. This is Estonian Bita Razavi’s kinetic sculpture, Kratt, whose beginnings can be found in the folklore of the artist’s homeland, and one that requires three drops of its master’s blood to be given as a gift to the devil in order for it to come ‘alive’. Taking the form of a sprawling mechanised arachnid printing press, it represents both servitude and, in its reach, the spreading of a colonial worldview.

When last we visited Finland, the UK was (unbelievably it felt back then as now) in the throes of Brexit and leaving the EU, and this time, Finland had recently joined NATO – seismic geopolitical shifts both. So it seemed fitting that we’d travelled from Liverpool – whose recent Biennial was “addressing the history and temperament” of a city haunted by the transatlantic slave trade, and what was once referred to as the second city of the British Empire – to Helsinki, undertaking, through art and artists (and an evolving population), its own reckoning with people and politics.

Each of these festivals of contemporary art wrestled with issues whose implications are both local and global. It’s art’s job to respond to, contend with, and to challenge. Neither Liverpool nor Helsinki lacks artists. Neither should they be found lacking in response to the most pressing concerns of our times.

Mike Pinnington

Images from top: Ateneum galleries, Helsinki. Stairway and studios in Academy of Fine Arts Main Building Mylly, University of the Arts Helsinki. Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Aino Myth triptych, 1891, Ateneum. Mike Pinnington on Vallisaari island, for Helsinki Biennial, and ferry. All photography by Laura Robertson, 2023, apart from second from last: Emilija Skarnulyte, Hypoxia, 2023, Helsinki Biennial 12.6.-17.9.2023, Vallisaari, Helsinki, Photo: © HAM/Helsinki Biennial/Kirsi Halkola

With thanks to Finnish Art Agency and Helsinki Partners

As FACT celebrates its 20th birthday, Laura Marie Brown looks back at one of the arts organisation’s definitive projects: when artists from around the world trained residents in Liverpool’s high rise flats to become producers and presenters of their own TV show. As subversive as video art had been, and tackling deeply divisive topics, tenantspin used early Internet tools, finds Brown, to make stars and pioneers of its co-creators…

“You made it what it was,” reads the final caption on End of Transmission, the last tenantspin film. Marking the end of its groundbreaking broadcast, the ‘Liverpool-based community-driven Internet TV project co-managed by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) and Arena Housing’ – ran from 1999 to 2013, and was funny, surreal, honest and empowering.

tenantspin began pre-social media, in the Internet’s feisty adolescence, before it became all jaded and aggressive. Back then, before citizen journalism was a phrase, joke and a punchline, it was hoped digital media would not merely speak truth to power but provide a level field with it. tenantspin brought some of Liverpool’s most disenfranchised citizens face-to-face with those who had real control over their lives, with web-casts and events, including meetings with local politicians. Why did it begin, why was it brilliant, and why hasn’t it been brought back?

tenantspin’s base was Coronation Court, Sparrow Hall estate, in Walton, North Liverpool, a now-demolished grey and imposing tower block built in 1956. Seven miles from the city centre, it was Liverpool’s first ‘ten storey flats,’ and would usher in a wave of 67 further high-rises across the skyline. By the end of the century, their future was in doubt and their residents were concerned about where, and how, they would live.

In 2000, FACT commissioned Danish artists group Superflex to develop the UK’s first ‘Superchannel’ in Coronation Court. Superchannel was a tool helping users to produce Internet TV (way before YouTube and live streaming was part and parcel of daily life). Superchannel was a network of local studios, meaning that users could create and evolve their own content, with live productions where audience and producers could chat and interact. In partnership with the Liverpool Housing Action Trust (HAT) the pilot became a long term project called tenantspin.

Looking back at that first commission over ten years later, one of the artists at Superflex, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, says the digital technology of a web channel provided a voice for tenants who wanted to know what would happen to their homes. “Tenants could see,” he says, “what was going on behind the scenes.” They broadcast a board meeting of the housing trust to the TVs in the flats within the blocks and online, providing direct access for the tenants into policy processes that would decide their futures.

Through tenantspin, residents could ask fundamental questions about what their changing neighbourhoods would look like, and crucially, have some say in how they would be shaped.

What began as a tool to help tenants evolved into an online TV channel, encompassing all of the city’s tower blocks, with the tenants as producers and presenters, and artists collaborating on bespoke projects. For Alan Dunn, who became lead artist in 2001, it became much more than simply a broadcast. “In my first few weeks at tenantspin I wondered about avoiding (or banning!) nostalgia. There were plenty of other great projects around the city based on reminiscing, and I wondered what would happen if we invited the tenants to instead think about today and tomorrow.”

The small idea would prove to be a vital one, rooting the tenants as agents of change with the capability to voice their opinions on a city shifting beneath them. It was an arts project, yes, but one that was intensely socially engaged with the opportunity to change mindsets as well as policy.

For FACT, tenantspin was a model for engaging elderly people, a sustainable and adaptable community project that would go on to create some memorable moments and commissions. Liverpool A-Z, for example, was a series of 26 films made by Kelly Mark and tenantspin. Filmed at a flat in Sefton Park, the project aimed to get to know Liverpool by talking to people whose names begin with the letters A-Z. The films were exhibited at FACT. A Winter’s Tale saw sound recordist and artist Chris Watson work with the tenants to record sound in Sefton Park and Liverpool city centre from 3pm to midnight. The two resulting 40 minute compositions created a portrait of human and animal conditions in Liverpool.

For HAT, and later the housing associations in the city that became involved, like Arena, it opened the door for tenants and housing providers to coexist, sharing ideas, experiences and practices.

Laura Yates, Head of Participation at Bluecoat, had worked at FACT since the building opened, first as front of house, and was later brought in to work on specific tenantspin projects.

“What we were trying to do was bridge lots of gaps, technology and tools, but the point was inclusion. I was interested in the voices of older people and the ‘thing’ was social housing. tenantspin was a trailblazing concept. It was never reliant on one member of staff, one artist or platform, instead it was helping people use the technology and conversation to connect.”

FACT had its roots in the subversive video art movement and the Video Positive festival, and moving into a building on Wood Street in 2003 risked shaving off its more grassroots rough edges. Yet it created a community-based collaboration that was talking about an inherently divisive and politically charged topic, like social housing, at a moment of profound change. tenantspin was as subversive as video art had ever been.

The late ‘90s and early ‘00s was the era of Pathfinder and New Heartlands, two deeply disruptive and controversial housing projects that were seen by many as tearing at the heart of traditional communities in Liverpool and beyond. The tension at its core was an ambition to build a new city, while many of those whose streets were being demolished, or were cited for demolition, saw it as social cleansing or gentrification at its very worst.

Pathfinder’s pace was astonishing in Liverpool. A programme to clear what was often viable housing, and its inhabitants, to renew areas led to widespread compulsory purchase orders, but a lack of investment meant that many lived in limbo for decades. Nowhere was this more evidently seen than in North Liverpool.

A 33-minute film produced by tenantspin, in partnership with Arena Housing Association, Anfield Changing, made by artist and filmmaker Kim Ryan, tracked the regeneration work in Anfield and Breckfield. It was honest and unflinching and controversial. Not all tenants opposed Pathfinder, and not all stakeholders wanted the process on camera. But at a moment of seismic change for local communities, the platform that was talking directly to residents was tenantspin, with its room for debate and discussion.

“These were big topics”, says Laura, “and what the technology did was to show us all how to discuss.”

There were two main strands to tenantspin: Ways of Living focused on community issues, like housing; and Ways of Seeing focused on art and creative practice. In a city in rapid transformation, against a backdrop of cultural reassessment – Liverpool was awarded the title of European Capital of Culture in 2003 for the year 2008 – tenantspin offered a voice to those who rarely had one in the modern city where ‘Livercool’ was focused more on a younger population who would grow into the new urban sprawl. These older people, older residents, were able to explore and reflect on the customs and traditions that had gone, while seeking their future place. It was intensely intergenerational and inclusive.

One of tenantspin’s most famous characters was John “Spoons” McGuirk, a former Merchant Navy seaman from Bootle, who became a tenantspin presenter. As comfortable interviewing rock legends and cultural icons (a rather surreal rendition of Lily the Pink with Mike McCartney featured on one webstream), to in-depth examinations of political theory, John offered something quite rare in art, says Laura: authenticity.

“It gave him a new lease of life,” she says. “tenantspin had an ethos of inclusivity and a collective voice, but with the power of individual creativity. With John, you watched someone become an artist.”

When John died in 2012, a livestream tribute from The Box at FACT was watched by people all over the world. John’s family expressed surprise, as they hadn’t known their father, grandfather, uncle and cousin had become such a star.

While tenantspin became a vital route for older people to have a voice and relevancy, culturally, it tied into a zeitgeist of wanting to incorporate older audiences, practitioners and technology into contemporary art and culture. From takeovers at the Museum of Liverpool and Tate Liverpool, complete with a full TV studio, ‘tenantspin on tour’ brought the concept to galleries and international conferences. It won awards and accolades. But by 2013, it was coming to an end. A moment of austerity, certainly, but also something more.

Artist Alan Dunn had left the project in 2007 and thought the landscape in social practice was changing. There was, he says, “less of an emphasis on funding ‘silver surfer’ projects and Arena wanted to reach out to younger tenants.”

It left a mark, though, and a legacy. Only two years after tenantspin ended, a housing-based collaborative project, Assemble, won the national Turner Prize for their work in Toxteth: another area deeply impacted by housing issues.

tenantspin’s demise leaves a marked gap. During Lockdown, for example, the power of tenantspin, to connect people locked in their homes, would have felt life-changing. At a moment when social housing is back on the political agenda, and the rights of communities to have a say over how – and where – they live are more important than ever, a collaboration between artists and tenants would provide a critical voice to those in charge.

In their 2013 film, End of Transmission, FACT founder Eddie Berg commented that the organisation “wouldn’t have had its character, spirit (and) identity without the tenantspin project, it became central to the FACT story.”

“It was the point,” says Laura Yates, “the heart of FACT.”

When you search for tenantspin on FACT’s website now, only two results come up. Google it and there are plenty of broken links. It is only tenantspin’s former team of producers that have managed to archive any of its videos and images as proof of its existence. Digital archiving, and how we preserve collaborative projects, is a bigger conversation, but for a project that was meant to be about using the internet to give voice, their lack of an online footprint seems a sad silencing.

At a time when any individual can use social media to disseminate their thoughts and opinions, on everything from fashion to football, the roots of this weird and joyfully collaborative project deserve a much firmer plinth. The socially marginalised and disenfranchised give time and energy to the arts to provide a conscience and compass. The early digital pioneers built on unusual foundations, but they broke ground in these artworks that went on to shape much of our modern digital landscape.

How far will we remember them, and refer to them once we reach Internet 4.0 or 5.0, if we struggle to find any of their work?

Coronation Court was demolished in the end. Its communities moved on, many continuing to contribute to tenantspin until they were no longer able to. Documenting change doesn’t always result in success, but sometimes the most important thing is that someone was listening.

Laura Marie Brown

tenantspin’s dedicated website can be found here at tenantspin.org

Images courtesy Alan Dunn, with thanks 

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

“I think the city is a book and we can read it and re-read it.” Mike Pinnington spoke with author Jeff Young about his memoir, Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay, our philosophical attachment to place, and how memories can play tricks…

We think of ghost towns as places bereft of life, people and, often, hope. Indeed, when the Specials wrote their 1981 hit song, it was a lament at the rampant inner-city downturn they’d seen first-hand at that time. For author Jeff Young, though, whose latest book bears the same title, it is a reference first and foremost to the people and stories that imbue places with life (thus enriching ours), even after they’re gone. In turn, we carry them with us and, like Chinese Whispers, pass them on; they’re all about us, in the streets we’ve walked, the bars we’ve frequented and the living rooms we’ve grown up in.

Recently nominated for Costa’s Biography Award, Young’s book – Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay – is variously autobiography, love letters to the city in which he was born (in 1957) and still lives, and intimate chat in the corner of the pub over a pint or two. “I quite like that it’s a book that nobody will know which shelf to put it on in the book shop… It’s a hybrid kind of book. It’s lots of different things – there is a history aspect to it, but it’s memoir and it’s a book of essays.” He is a warm and engaging conversationalist, a trait that comes through, seemingly effortlessly, in his writing. When I ask him what he was striving for, he explains that he was looking for a “confessional” voice, but also “tried to get on the page the way I speak, as close as I possibly could… as if we were in the pub, or going on a walk together and having a conversation. When you read it, I’m just telling you.”

Liverpool as Memory

He was also trying to be honest about how we sometimes “fictionalise the past. I think there’s a way of, when we tell each other a story, to ourselves or to our friends over and over again, it becomes altered in some way.” The book is, he continues, “a bit of a struggle with memory, or an engagement with memory.” Between each of Ghost Town’s chapters is a photograph: of streets, people, paintings, sculpture, buildings, and books. What Young refers to as potent images “found on top of wardrobes and in shoe boxes.” They correspond, he says, “to that thing we were saying about memory. When you’ve got the photograph, you start to remember the content. And that slightly alters the memory that you had in your imagination.”

He uses, by way of an example, “a brilliant photograph of my granddad and my nanna. They’re both holding up bottles of beer and they’re thoroughly enjoying themselves. I never ever saw nanna and granddad drinking, but in that photograph, they’ve got bottles of beer!”

None of the photographs has a title, or a caption to explain context. “Part of the way the photographs are placed, they should be like when you buy a second-hand book, and something falls out of the pages. It might be an old postcard, or a photograph, or a pressed flower, or whatever. The way the images are placed in the book should feel like that.

“They’re deliberately not captioned. We just have to make up our own minds. I like the mystery of it. We wanted them to be ghosts and unexplained. When you read them in the context of the text, there’s a resonance to it.” It’s true, and as you hoover up Ghost Town’s pages, the images become portals as opposed to mysteries to be solved – through them, we access Young’s world, but also a kind of shared cultural archive, of old hairstyles, wallpapers, fashions and architecture.

Liverpool as Living Thing

In the book, he speaks of his “emotional – and philosophical – attachment” to Liverpool and, although he confesses to me to be “a bit nervous of the term psychogeography”, it deals with the specifics of place as much as it does people. Often, this is in reference to “places that have been treated carelessly and neglected. It’s not just an observation of what used to be there, you can feel the pain”, Young says. One such location is Lime Street which, he writes, he used to “think of … as a place made from films. It had three cinemas, and the movies spilled out of them, flooded the street and animated the pavements with mystery, desire and drama.”

For me, Lime Street is just the place you go to get the train. “There’s no way that the new Lime Street will ever possess memories,” he concurs. “It’s sterile. It’s an empty space now. People are never going to say ‘oh, we went to so and so’s on Lime Street on Saturday night’. It’s never gonna happen. That street can’t tell stories [anymore]. It’s been exorcised.”

Liverpool as a Conversation

It’s clear he feels a responsibility to Liverpool, one shared by all of its constituents. “I wanted the book to be – I don’t wanna use the word statement, but I can’t think of a different word. This is what this place means – it’s what it means to me right now, and what does it mean to you? What does it mean for the people who are reading it?” He situates Richard Wilson’s Turning the Place Over, a temporary work on the former Yates’ Wine Lodge at Cross Keys House, Moorfields, as a trigger for such questions. “I think that was one of the most remarkable conversations about the city. That artwork, it wasn’t just like a gimmicky event in the city. I think it was a conversation. ‘Look at it. Look at the fabric. What do places mean? What do buildings mean?’ I try and talk about that in the book as a starting point to have a conversation.

“It’s like saying ‘let’s have a pause’. That was a kind of a punctuation – a place to stop, a place to think. A place to look at a derelict building, a derelict building reimagined. And so, therefore, what does that inspire us to think about the rest of the city? That’s one of the most powerful interventions into the fabric of the city for years and years, I think.”

Liverpool as Novel

As our conversation progresses, it emerges that, for him, Liverpool – and by extension, all cities – are, in many ways, akin to books. “When you read a novel when you’re seventeen and then you read it again when you’re thirty or forty, or whatever, you find different things – in the white spaces between the ink, in the places where thought happens. I think cities are like that. I think the city is a book and we can read it and re-read it. Within the pages and within the words, the city has pages, and it has words, and it has chapters, I think.” In that case, I ask, what do you think the next chapters in Liverpool’s book will read like? His assessment, it’s fair to say, is that of a clear-eyed realist.

“Stories won’t be told about Liverpool One, and they won’t be told about Liverpool Waters, or going to the supermarket on Lime Street. Stories are told in places where communities gather, where people gather; to be with other people and to exchange ideas and thoughts and tales. What the city needs, if it’s gonna have any future chapters, is to maintain and to nurture those kinds of places.”

He bemoans the loss of grass roots, often maverick spaces (such as the Kazimier and Mello Mello), lost to land grabs and urban development, and highlights such gentrification as a risk to Liverpool’s ongoing story. “It’s really upsetting when you see independent venues closing, isn’t it? The thing that replaces the independent building is a diminishment of what was there, y’know? It’s just careless and thoughtless.”

He’s keen, though, to guard against rose-tinted nostalgia in and of itself. “New places are always going to be built and that’s good, but they need to have some kind of vision and integrity and take care of the people.” For Young, it starts with us, the people (and our ghosts, no doubt). “It’s not buildings that make a city, it’s the people and those people have to have a connection with place [for stories to continue to be told]”. His message, and it’s fair to say it’s a sound one, is: “Protect the stories.”

Mike Pinnington

Catch Jeff Young in conversation with Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Mon, 14 December, 7pm

Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay is available now in bookshops and via Little Toller Books

With the UK’s shambolic withdrawal from the EU finally confirmed, we look at the role Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture Award played in the city’s 21st Century renaissance…

In Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery there hangs a small cluster of paintings by L.S. Lowry, two of which are identified as Liverpool scenes. In one – The Liver Buildings, Liverpool (1959) – Lowry captures a view of the river Mersey implausible today. We see the hustle and bustle of a busy waterway as it would have been at that time; it is filled with all manner of vessel, behind which, three of the city’s most famous landmarks loom. These are the ‘Three Graces’ – the Royal Liver, Cunard and Port of Liverpool buildings. Still dominating the waterfront today, in this context they point to a bygone era, reminding us of Liverpool’s then maritime driven economy (built, in-part, on the city’s role in the transatlantic slave trade).

On the banks of the Mersey is the Royal Albert Dock. Founded in 1846, in its day, it stored highly-prized cargoes from around the world. Twenty years or so after Lowry’s painting, however, the docks, by then too small to accommodate the increased capacity of shipping containers, had fallen foul of progress. Unsustainable, they closed in 1972 and, left to dereliction and disrepair, they became an emblem of Liverpool’s catastrophic downturn. In 1988, however, the plain old Albert Dock (as it still was then) was somewhat miraculously reopened following the involvement of the Merseyside Development Corporation, a government initiative charged with regenerating the location. Today, it is a proud component of the city’s UNESCO designated World Heritage status, an oasis of relative calm just two minutes from the hubbub of Liverpool One and a major tourist attraction. Now part of a vital cultural and lifestyle economy rather than a maritime one, instead of dockers, it welcomes throngs of cruise ship passengers and day-trippers.

A key tenet of this transformation was Tate Liverpool, which celebrated its 30th birthday in 2018. Originally designated by directors as a ‘Tate for the North’, a kind of satellite that would exist only to display the national collection of art beyond London, its employees would soon harbour – and fulfil – larger objectives, and ultimately host an ambitious programme of exhibitions, international in scope. Stimulating the city’s expectations, it foreshadowed a startling revival of fortunes, and paved the way for more besides. It is often commented that Liverpool – perhaps uniquely in the UK – is a city that looks outward, beyond its shores. Apt then that from 1999, it has played host to its own Biennial, the UK’s festival of contemporary art that which, according to its website, ‘has commissioned 305 new artworks and presented work by over 450 artists from around the world’. Such internationalism, however, is frequently levelled as a criticism, in that artworks and artists are parachuted in at the expense of what and who is on the doorstep, leading to often fraught conversations about legacy and those outside the city centre. Almost as if to prove this truism, one of the Biennial’s most successful outputs began as a project that would become Homebaked – a successful, cooperatively run bakery situated in Anfield, a stone’s throw from Liverpool Football Club’s stadium.

In 2010, the site on which it stands had been designated for demolition under the Housing Market Renewal Initiative (HMRI). Initially supported and facilitated by the Biennial and Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, this inner-city project has sustained itself long beyond the socially engaged artist phase. Becoming something of a best-practice model, it has spawned related projects proposing community-led development and regeneration, and addressed questions of affordable housing, public outdoor spaces and social enterprise. I asked then Biennial director Sally Tallant about local value and international ambition: “I think together with the team and our partners, we have done something that has increased its [the Biennial’s] international reach and reputation, and certainly visibility; and at the same time, we’ve been able to do some amazing, really embedded projects with communities.”

Enabled by the momentum Tate Liverpool and the Biennial helped to kindle, 2018 marked a decade since the city celebrated its status as European Capital of Culture. The second UK recipient of the award – after Glasgow in 1990 – our shameful and shambolic withdrawal from the European Union means it is (at least for now) to be the last. The extent to which the award was a transformative one for the city cannot be overlooked: although Liverpool has always had a strong sense of self and self-worth, this had arguably been tempered by factors beyond its control. Still struggling to emerge from the corrosive 1980s, there existed a problem of perception, its reputation and (self-) esteem tarnished. Growing up in Merseyside, one cannot help but remember the sting of terminology such as ‘managed decline’, the flagrant misreporting of the city, and the aftermath of tragedies such as Hillsborough. As a result, when Liverpool ushered in its 2008 celebrations, it did so with pride, certainly, but also with crossed fingers. Today, it feels different. Rather than a siege mentality borne of recent history, there is a confidence, and with it a sense of expectation: things happen here.

Let’s not forget either that Liverpool is blessed with medium to large arts institutions. Along with the aforementioned Walker and Tate Liverpool, we have the Bluecoat – itself reopened in ’08 following a £14 million redevelopment, FACT, (Film, Art & Creative Technology), and the Grade II listed Victoria Gallery & Museum (also opened in 2008 following significant renovation). Add to this the relocation to Mann Island in 2011 of Open Eye Gallery, and it begins to look like an embarrassment of riches. A true test of cultural good health, however, can’t be based on these terms alone. The proliferation of artist-led, independent spaces such as The Royal Standard is, perhaps, a better barometer. Founded in 2006, TRS has recently relocated to Northern Lights in the flourishing Baltic Triangle. Under the same roof are other creatives. Among them, Dead Ink Books, ‘a small, ambitious and experimental literary publisher’. Relative newcomers Output gallery (on Seel Street) has added its name to the rising tide of street level innovation. Dedicated to showcasing artists from or based in the city, it has quickly become essential to our cultural landscape, adding yet more gravitational pull to a destination rich with opportunities for emerging artists and creatives of all stripes.

As we know, however, such growth and regeneration – arts-led or otherwise – almost inevitably leads to gentrification, and with it, opportunism, so that any emerging, recently graduated artists may swiftly find themselves priced out of their currently affordable rents. Spaces previously occupied by indie bars and venues have made way for, you guessed it, student flats, chain bars and hotels.When I first began researching this piece, it was announced that Liverpool City Council’s Cabinet, no doubt emboldened by the Baltic Triangle effect, was set to approve a (since ratified) policy poised to shape the development of a so-called ‘Ten Streets’ creativity district. Intended for ‘artists, independent creatives, makers and digital and technology sectors’, Liverpool’s Mayor Joe Anderson said at the time: “Ten Streets has a huge potential to transform North Liverpool and this new planning policy will ensure we have the building blocks to guide its direction. The whole area is on the brink of a very bright future.”

Innovators, artists, digital start-ups and others – the doers who occupy, and feed so-called creative quarters – are often used to paper over cracks, or as handy soundbites by city administrators; here, that equates to the powering of an ‘Engine for Growth’. Cynicism borne of experience comes all too easy, yet it remains to be seen what the future holds: continuing, healthy regeneration, although not to be taken for granted, feels almost like a given right now. But, will it be versus – or in tandem with – creeping gentrification?

Mike Pinnington

This is a version of an essay that originally appeared in Present Tense: A decade since Liverpool EU Capital of Culture… What now?

Images: Tate Liverpool site under construction, Albert Dock, 1988. Photo credit © Tate; 2Up 2Down/Homebaked

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 – Continuing: Manchester Open Exhibition 2020 @ Home Manchester – FREE

In case it passed you by in the malaise of mid-January, Manchester Open continues at Home until 29 March. So-called due to its truly open-to-all policy, entries were sought from ’people of any background and level of experience,’ whether they be ‘established professionals, new and emerging talent, enthusiastic amateurs [or] first-time artists.’ With painting, print, photography, sculpture, digital and mixed media, video and audio, spoken word, performance and more currently rubbing shoulders, the show is a fine opportunity to check out the state of the arts in Greater Manchester.

Tuesday – Vampire Power: Vampir-Cuadecuc + Mark of Lilith 8.30pm @ BFI Southbank, London – £13.25

I, for one, will never tire of the Vampire. Grotesque, beautiful, sexy and threatening, its potential to reflect and comment upon the times in which we live is surpassed only by science fiction. And then not by much. In the hands of Catalan director Pere Portabella, it becomes an allegory for dictator-era Spain. His ‘intensely experimental’ Vampir-Cuadecuc (1972) is screened alongside Mark of Lilith (1986, Dirs Polly Gladwin, Zachary Mack-Nataf, Bruna Fionda), which explores the politics of race and relationships.

Wednesday – Exhibition Closing: Sense Sound/Sound Sense: Fluxus Music, Scores & Records in the Luigi Bonotto Collection @ Whitechapel Gallery, London – FREE

Founded in the 1960s by George Maciunas, Fluxus began as an international network of artists and composers. Its purpose, said Maciunas, was to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art” with collaborations between artists and the overlap of art forms to the fore. This exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery explores Fluxus artists’ interest in music and sound, and includes work by John Cage, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono among others.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Amanda Jackson – To Build A Home 7pm @ Ropes & Twines, Liverpool – FREE

Shortlisted for the Environmental Photographer of the Year in 2015, Amanda Jackson’s To Build A Home series captures the apparently idyllic community of an Eco Village in Pembrokeshire. We see children at play and adults toiling in fields. Some images – people in makeshift housing, shacks in the forest – evoke a glimpse of our possible near future, should climate catastrophe take hold. Hear from Jackson, who will be talking about her work tonight. Also in conversation is fellow photographer Stephen Clarke, whose complementary talk will address documentary photography with a focus on the domestic.

Akira in 35mm 6.20pm @ the ICA, London – £13

Set against the backdrop of a dystopian Neo-Tokyo where gang violence threatens a fragile post-war society, and secret military experimentation is par for the course, Akira follows the (mis)fortunes of a group of friends. For some it needs little introduction – it opened the floodgates to the West for manga and anime in the 90s – a landmark film, its impact and influence still resonate on both sides of the pond. There has also been much speculation of a live-action version being on the horizon, but don’t hold your breath just yet… From the archive: Akira at 25

Friday – What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About The Artist-Led (Symposium) 10.30am @ the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool – FREE

Artist-led spaces, by which I mean those that tend to sit outside the mainstream, are regularly volunteer ran, programming work too edgy, raw or imperfect to make it into your typical monolithic gallery. Shoestring budgets are managed by arts grads looking to break into the sector. A severe testing ground, those that come through it (many, jaded and exhausted, don’t) often find themselves in that very mainstream. The blurb for this event goes further, asserting that ‘practitioners and their collectives, groups and organisations have found themselves routinely co-opted, exploited and appropriated by external actors and institutions’. This timely symposium ‘seeks to provide a neutral space’ for conversation, strategy and proposals to be aired.

Faces Places 7pm @ Metal, Liverpool – £Pay What You Can

When director and artist Agnès Varda died last year, she left behind a wonderfully mischievous and playful body of work. A trailblazer of the New Wave, her longevity saw her outlive many of her peers, eventually earning richly deserved if belated recognition. So, any opportunity to revisit her oeuvre is worthy of mention and documentary Faces Places, which came in an Indian Summer of Varda’s career, catches the grand dame of French Cinema in sparkling form. From the archive: read our interview with Agnès Varda

Saturday – Beija Flo’s Nudes 8pm @ the Kazimier Stockroom, Liverpool – £20

Closing tomorrow, Beija Flo’s current exhibition at Output has a raw, autobiographical energy to it, fusing activism and performance art in a “very personal collection of music and art about how I saw and captured my body”. Details for tonight’s send off are as yet very thin on the ground, billed simply as ‘an extremely special event’. But given the content of the exhibition, in which current single Nudes is the focal point (alongside self-portrait photography and illustrations), it’s a fair bet that it’ll be performative in nature.

Sunday – Exhibition Closing: William Blake @ Tate Britain, London – £18

Quite rightly described as a visionary today, “in his own time,” says Liz Mitchell, “he was an oddity, an outcast whose weird nightmare visions put him beyond the pale of the Academy. And when you actually look — really look — at his work,” Mitchell continues, “it is mighty strange.” Mitchell was responding to Blake’s 2016 Tate Liverpool presentation (in a display alongside Tracey Emin). The painter, printmaker and poet is the subject of this solo show (closing today) at Tate Britain, which seeks to reposition Blake as “a visual artist for the 21st century”.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media from top: Akira; George Brecht Incidental Music 1961. Performed by Ken Friedman, Geoff Hendricks, Al Hansen, and Ben Vautier (left to right) at “Milano Poesia”, Ansaldo, Milan, 1989. Photo: F. Garghetti. Courtesy of Fondazione Bonotto. Copyright © Fabrizio Garghetti. All Rights Reserved; still from Agnès Varda’s Faces Places; William Blake ‘Europe’ Plate i: Frontispiece, ‘The Ancient of Days’ 1827 (?) © The Whitworth, The University of Manchester

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 – ARTIST ROOMS: Vija Celmins @ Quay Arts Centre, Isle of Wight – FREE

“I’m not a very confessional artist, you know. I don’t ever reveal what I’m feeling in my work, or what I think about the President. I use nature. I use found images.” In case (like us) you missed it, this presentation of Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins’ work opened over the weekend at the Isle of Wight’s Quay Arts Centre. Meticulous in her exquisite renderings of natural phenomena, at Quay Arts, that includes depictions of the ocean, the vastness of the night sky, the darkness of deep space and the intricacies of a spider’s web.

Tuesday – Exhibition Opening: Mark Leckey: O’ Magic Power of Bleakness @ Tate Britain, London – £13

Speaking to The Double Negative back in 2012, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey said: “What everyone says about the art world being London focused and up its own arse isn’t that wrong.” Interesting, then, that O’ Magic Power of Bleakness – an exhibition of ‘atmospheric, theatrical experience of spectral visions, sound and video’ opening today at Tate Britain – sees a life-size replica of a Wirral motorway bridge transposed to Pimlico. Proving that, while you can take the boy out of Wirral… From the archive: Read our interview with Mark Leckey

Volver 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

With Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, Pain and Glory, still in cinemas, now is a great time to discover and/or reacquaint oneself with the Spanish auteur’s back catalogue. Tonight, FACT screens Volver, starring Penélope Cruz. Meanwhile, streaming service Mubi has programmed The Art of Transgression: The Cinema of Almodóvar, a season of films in his honour. With many a critic declaring Pain and Glory one of the director’s finest, you’re hardly short of opportunities to judge for yourself right now.

Wednesday – Leviathan: Empathy In and Out of Species 6.30pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – £5/3

Currently on display at the Bluecoat, Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan (including film, VR, textile and neon works) places us in an imagined future to explore connections between mass migration and marine environments. Empathy In and Out of Species is the first of a pair of complementary symposia relating to the themes in Dawood’s work. This week, Professor Alex Balch (University of Liverpool), PhD student Samantha Hook (University of Manchester) and Jennifer Verson (Director of Migrant Artists Mutual Aid) discuss immigration, man’s threat to our fellow species and political engagement.

Thursday – Book Launch: Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything 6pm @ Tate Liverpool – £5

Deborah Levy (The Cost of Living) first came to our attention speaking at Frieze event, Where Art Meets Literature. Speaking on ‘the art world as home of literary experiment’, she knocked our socks off with a reflection on the work and process of photographer, Francesca Woodman (a version of which was later published in Tate Etc.) We’re over the moon, then, that the author is at Tate Liverpool this week to discuss new novel The Man Who Saw Everything, described in a recent review as “An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel…”

Parasite 6pm @ Liverpool John Moores University Redmonds Building – FREE

Those familiar with Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 picture The Host (in which military pollutants herald sightings of a mutant amphibious creature) may be forgiven for assuming that his latest film, Parasite, is a sequel of sorts. In fact, commenting on engrained social strata, the film is more satirical suspense thriller than ecological sci fi. That said, in his review, the Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw called it: “almost a supernatural or sci-fi story; an invasion of the lifestyle snatchers.” But if you’re squeamish about lingering genre associations, don’t let the assessment put you off: Parasite unanimously won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, the first Korean film to do so.

Friday – Scalarama: Anthropocene: The Human Epoch 7.30pm @ Glasgow CCA – £8/FREE

Scalarama, the annual nationwide celebration of cinema, continues. Running until the end of this month in venues large, small and often non-traditional, it is inspired by the energy and DIY spirit of the legendary Scala Cinema. Founded in 2011, the festival runs on the dictum of “by everyone, for everyone, everywhere,” foregrounding the passion of exhibitors and audiences above all else. Among this week’s screenings (and chiming with Dawood at the Bluecoat), is Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, which explores how our activities have impacted the earth.

Exhibition Opening: Works from the Hallucinated Archive @ Bonington Gallery, Nottingham – FREE

Nottingham-based artist Wayne Burrows’ work is interested in the overlaps between historical fact, fiction and myth. Blurring the authentic and imaginary, new show Works from the Hallucinated Archive includes five real, and one not-so-real artist (Burrows alter ego Robert Holcombe) to ‘explore ideas of authenticity, class and cultural identity’. Alongside Burrows/Holcombe, the exhibition features the work of contemporary artists Aslı Anık, Arianne Churchman, Maryam Hashemi, Chloe Langlois and Z.K. Oloruntoba, united in their interest in ideas around ‘folklore, spiritual(ist) belief and art as psychic manifestation or transmission’.

Saturday – Exhibition Closing: A Foul and Awesome Display – Kirsty Harris @ Vane, Newcastle – FREE

The term ‘decisive moment’, is most commonly related to photography. It describes that split second where patience, discipline and inspiration combine to produce a truly great image. But, for painter Kirsty Harris, it is the moment that “iconically represents our race,” via nuclear bomb testing, “to self-destruction. The beauty and awe of the landscape, the dust, the glow, the force of the explosion. The myths surrounding the characters in this master-plan to kill ourselves off. The fight for survival. We’ve shown ourselves THE END.” Born in 1978, Harris grew up at the tail end of the cold war, joining her family on CND marches, when man-made Armageddon still loomed large; her vast paintings a kind of memento mori for humanity.

Sunday – Exhibition Closing: David Lynch: My Head is Disconnected @ Home Manchester – FREE

Intrigued by Twin Peaks as a kid, but unable to catch it often enough (it definitely was not on my folks’ watchlist), my first proper encounter with the work of David Lynch was Lost Highway. It’s still one of my favourite films of his and, thankfully, it formed part of the Lynch cinema strand at HOME, programmed for July’s Manchester International Festival. In addition to the screenings, though (and perhaps more intriguing), My Head Is Disconnected, is the first major UK exhibition of Lynch’s paintings, drawings and sculpture – darkly complementary in tone to his on-screen output. Read our review

Exhibition Closing: Ibrahim Mahama: Parliament of Ghosts @ the Whitworth, Manchester – FREE

At the Whitworth gallery, Ghanaian artist Mahama combines painting, sculpture, photography and film; reclaimed train seats and railway sleepers, school furniture and retrieved archival documents to reflect upon and bring focus to the unfolding history of his home country. Overlooked documents of post-colonialism made visible, Parliament of Ghosts gives voice to a country negotiating and stating its independence.

Mike Pinnington

Images from top: Vija Celmins, Drypoint – Ocean Surface (1983). ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Vija Celmins; Volver (still); Deborah Levy; Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (film poster); Kirsty Harris, Charlie (2017); Home page/main: Arianne Churchman, We Entered Through The Chime Line – Chime Cockadoodledoo (2019)

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 – Exhibition Opening: Nasser Al Salem: Amma Baad 6.30pm @ Delfina Foundation, London – FREE

Described on his website as “first and foremost a calligrapher”, Nasser Al Salem’s latest series of works set out to explore the relationship between language, time and space. For his first UK solo exhibition, he presents sculptural objects and works on paper that take the Arabic phrase ‘amma baad’ as their point of departure, loosely meaning ‘whatever comes after’. Apt in this time of seemingly constant geo-political upheaval.

Tuesday – In Conversation: on László Moholy-Nagy 6.30pm @ Hauser & Wirth, London – FREE

Bauhausler László Moholy-Nagy believed in the potential of art as a vehicle for social transformation, and his teachings and artwork remain influential. Here, his grandson and director of the Moholy-Nagy Foundation, Daniel Hug, discusses his legacy with Catherine Ince, chief curator at the V&A East. Catch the exhibition convened in his name while you’re there.

Wednesday – The Liquid Club #6: Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher 6.30pm @ The Royal Standard, Liverpool – FREE

Writing in these pages earlier in the year, Stephanie Gavan observed that blogger and cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s “warning is clear and more relevant now than ever”. She was referring to the opening chapter of his book, Capitalist Realism, in which Fisher states: “We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other.” The subject of tonight’s Biennial discussion group, Capitalist Realism may well be required reading in these times of looming and/or worsening disaster capitalism.

Joan As Policewoman 7.30pm @ Epstein Theatre, Liverpool – £22.50

Earlier this year, Joan Wasser (aka Joan As Policewoman) released Joanthology, a generous triple disc career retrospective. The compilation, described in Louder Than War as “utterly essential”, no doubt showcases the brand of lusciously leftfield pop that first brought her to our attention with the likes of My Gurl. Slick, vulnerable, arch and spiky in roughly equal measure, grab this midweek treat with both hands. Read: My Gurl: Subverting Rock.

Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Yasmin Ali as part of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 6pm @ Output gallery, Liverpool – FREE

Officially getting underway from Friday, founded to “represent Arab culture and Arab people in a positive way, and to harness that curious ability art has to allow one person, with one set of life experiences, to speak directly to the heart of another”, this year’s Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) is upon us. Hit the ground running with Yasmin Ali’s solo exhibition at Output. Working across photography, poetry and film, fittingly, Ali’s work “focuses on the exploration and celebration of diverse identities”.

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Shezad Dawood: Leviathan, Grace Ndiritu: The Ark 6pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE

Friday sees a double-whammy of exhibition openings at the Bluecoat, with Shezad Dawood’s Leviathan, and Grace Ndiritu’s The Ark. Dawood’s film, Leviathan (shown alongside VR, textile and neon works) places us in an imagined future – can there be any other kind? – to explore connections between mass migration and marine environments. Ndiritu’s The Ark, meanwhile, sees the artist present the culmination of her 2017 research, which placed scientists, artists and spiritual practitioners in an off-grid setting.

Immix Ensemble & Forest Swords – Trespassing 9pm @ Southbank Centre, London – FREE

Forming part of the New Music Biennial – “a showcase of composers and music creators who are pushing the boundaries of music in the UK” – this new commission investigates how music and cities inform, influence and affect each other. Created by Forest Swords and Immix Ensemble, Trespassing asks “How is the identity of a city expressed in its soundscape? How does this connect to our sense of ownership over public space? And what might public spaces feel and sound like in the future?”

Saturday – Exhibition Closing: Sweet Debris @ Waterside Gallery, Sale – FREE

Curator Mario Popham brings together the diverse work of Theo Simpson, Hannah Farrell, Chris Rhodes and Phoebe Kiely, to explore the “meaning and beauty amongst the detritus of modern life”. It is also an opportunity to consider what we mean when we talk about photography today, in light of the ubiquity of image-sharing platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. A last chance to see this exhibition foregrounding how interesting and varied new channels of dispersal are being developed by practitioners in the field.

In Conversation: John Akomfrah 1pm @ BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead – £5

His status as a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective and works such as 2012’s The Unfinished Conversation – an archival piece reflecting on the career of  cultural theorist Stuart Hall – have made John Akomfrah a voice to be heard. Responding to and reflecting issues relating to the black diaspora, beginning with the social tensions of 1980s Brixton, his is an ambitious, vital practice. Here, Akomfrah discusses the themes informing new exhibition, Ballasts of Memory, with BALTIC curator Alessandro Vincentelli. In Profile: John Akomfrah.

The Book of Cairo at Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 3pm @ The World Museum, Liverpool – £3.79–£6.98

More Arab Arts Festival, this time in conjunction with short-story specialists, Comma Press. Appearing in translation for the first time, The Book of Cairo features 10 writers offering different perspectives on Cairene life, weaving together satire, surrealism, love and humour, to grants us an insight into a city that, through the mediums of TV and film, we think we all know. Here, author, translator and editor Raph Cormack selects readings from The Book of Cairo alongside his fellow contributor Thoraya El-Rayyes.

Sunday – Celebrating Youssef Chahine: Alexandria… Why? 3pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Last year, Egypt’s Misr International Films (MIF) launched a restoration project for the films of its founder, renowned Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, to mark the 10th anniversary of his death. Working at the forefront of Arabic cinema, UK viewers (thanks to LAAF) now have the opportunity to experience three examples of his oeuvre for the first time, beginning tonight with Alexandria… Why? (1979). Winning the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, it is the tale of an Egyptian teen, dreaming of a life working in Golden Age Hollywood.

Mike Pinnington

Images from top: Joan As Policewoman © Allison Michael Orenstein; Mark Fisher; Yasmin Ali; Forest Swords; John Akomfrah