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

“Tt became apparent that these photographs of Pompeii could stand in for Chester.” Stephen Clarke on Up Deva!, an exhibition drawing inspiration from sources as varied as past glories, Frankie Howerd comedy, Up Pompeii! and exotic creatures… 

Nearly two thousand years ago Pompeii was buried under volcanic ash and debris. The city’s population was wiped out and the buildings vanished from view. Over the centuries the location and even the name of this city were forgotten. In the late sixteenth century Pompeii’s presence became evident when it was excavated first by chance and then, much later, with purpose. By the twentieth century Pompeii was established as a site for tourists to visit. In 1989, it was as a tourist that I took my photographs. The site had become a sprawling collection of ruins covered in vegetation. The negatives of these black and white pictures lay dormant in my archive for 34 years; only recently have they been scanned and explored.

In conversation with illustrator Steph Coathupe it became apparent how these photographs of Pompeii could stand in for Chester. Both places are known for their Roman remains; but whereas one is the ruins of a city in its entirety, the other is a settlement that has incorporated Roman ruin into its fabric as it continually develops as an urban environment. As well as its connection to the ancient empire, Chester is home to one of the world’s leading zoos. It seemed an obvious step to bring together Roman ancestry and a modern zoo, and to let the animals roam the city. Coathupe had been working in the Art and Design department at the University of Chester as part of the AA2A (Artists Access to Art College) scheme. It was in the context of Chester Contemporary, curated by Ryan Gander, that we developed our discussion into a project.

The title of the exhibition, Up Deva! – an homage to the British sitcom Up Pompeii! (1969–1970) that starred Frankie Howerd – sets the tone. Humour was a key feature of this collaboration, born out of a satirical response to the hubris – not uncommon in the world of visual art – surrounding Chester Contemporary. The pictures of ruins are a reminder of past glory, while the inclusion of the brightly coloured animals could be interpreted as referring to the participants, both visitors and exhibitors, as exotic creatures invading this locale. The combination of my photographs and the drawings made by Coathupe bring to mind the characters in the Disney film Jungle Book (1967). In particular the scenes set in the ruins of the abandoned city that is inhabited by monkeys and ruled by King Louie the orangutan.

Not only have the animals taken ownership of the places where men once lived but they start to speak like them too. In the accompanying wall text, a third collaborator, the writer Hannah Harry, makes the connection between Chester and Pompeii as places of tourism. Harry also wrote brief captions for each picture that provide the animals with their own voices. These captions take the form of messages found on the backs of postcards that the animals might have sent to their families. This kind of anthropomorphism can be found in many children’s stories. One such example is the film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) where the enchanted animals that inhabit the island of Naboombu interact with the human travellers of the flying bed with the magical bedknob.

The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis (published between 1950 and 1956) conjures up another fantastic land of talking creatures. The god of Narnia is the great lion Aslan. For Up Deva!, Coathupe has a lion (below) introduce the viewers to the scene. Through an archway he welcomes us to the Large Theatre of Pompeii. This is the opening to the exhibition at the Rainbow Tea Rooms. To other scenes are added iguanas that overrun the courthouse, penguins that plunge into a painted mural, and a giraffe that pokes its head from an empty pool in the atrium of a house. These animals added to the photographs are gigantic, another effect of creative magic. The diminutive human tourists in one scene seem unaware of the danger of a huge python (top) that wraps itself around the walls of the amphitheatre.

A sinister vision of wild animals taking control was portrayed in the film Planet of the Apes (1968). Following a nuclear war, the world is ruled by orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The exhibition has this undercurrent, raising the possibility of what would happen if the city suffered a cataclysm and the animals of the zoo escaped to prowl the streets of Chester. In 1986, such a fate did befall the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, which became uninhabitable following a nuclear catastrophe. Eventually, the deserted human settlement was overrun by flora and fauna. As with ancient Pompeii, the modern post-apocalyptic landscape of Chernobyl became a tourist destination and a fascination to some artists. Less welcome were more recent visitors to this city in the form of invading Russian military, a reminder of the precarious nature of civilisation.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art and Design: Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

Up Deva! Steph Coathupe, Stephen Clarke, and Hannah Harry continues at The Rainbow Tea Rooms, Chester until December 2023, and is part of the Chester Contemporary Fringe

How to test the water of contemporary art? Jerwood Art’s Survey, on display at the Bluecoat, sets out to do just that. Mike Pinnington reviews… 

Opening last year at Jerwood Arts, Survey – “the largest review of contemporary art practice” in their history – brought together 15 early-career artists based in the UK. Selected by head of programme, Sarah Williams (from nominations made by slightly older heads including Rachel Maclean, Pil and Gallia Kollectiv and Ryan Gander), works cover many disciplines – sculpture, film, painting, drawing, collage. The wide-ranging show, on display at the Bluecoat in Liverpool since April, offers another opportunity for exposure to this group of artists still finding their way.

Anyone familiar with the layout of the Bluecoat will know that its exhibition spaces can seem somewhat awkward, and can pose a problem to natural rhythm or flow for the audience. That the first work encountered is film, then, feels quite a brave decision. Even regular art gallery visitors won’t necessarily have the proclivity or patience to enter a black box and sit in front of moving image work on arrival. I’m not certain either that, if they do, they would feel rewarded by Anna Raczynski’s film The Movie Makers, about an amateur film group based in Colne, Lancashire. Documentary in style, it deals with the passage of time, the ageing process and community. It has something of the feel of so-called Slow TV about it, a genre that is allowed to unfold in real time, and relies on the relative endurance of the viewer – only here, you don’t have the option of putting the kettle on and coming back to pick up where you left off.

Emerging into the light, you meet A Track with No Name, a pair of images by Simeon Barclay (another, Decoy, awaits in gallery 4). Concerned with identity, popular culture, its dispersal and potency, Barclay’s appropriation of photography and use with text in collage seems to owe something to figures such as Barbara Kruger, who employs the seductive visual language of advertising so effectively. His work in Gallery 4 even drops that word – seductive – as if to literally spell out the subtly dangerous allure of mass media imagery. His works are something of a throwback, then, but no less welcome for that. Further along this long corridor-like space there hangs, like an old trade union banner, Chris Alton’s A Hollywood Film, in which Climate Change is Averted. It’s a clarion call for a bigger, louder transmission of the defining issue of our time. That it asks for the platform to be Hollywood points, perhaps (somewhat sadly), to the sense that the problem confronting all of us will be rehearsed/dealt with in fiction before and after the catastrophe that surely awaits.

Stepping into Gallery 2, all around there are works of different sizes and description, and the space is host to six artists – on the wall to your left are Will Sheridan Jr’s Ownership Boxes. Made from discarded cardboard found in London’s affluent Mayfair district, they have been repurposed and mounted with photographs to mimic our bombardment by fashion ads. I know this because I read the leaflet that you can pick up at the entrance to the show, but for those who don’t like to refer to physical texts as they walk, getting under the skin of this exhibition is probably on the challenging side. Contemporary art can be difficult, and I feel a small rethink of interpretation would have been useful and generous here. How much effort would it have been to include a short caption next to each of the artists’ work, for instance?

One of my favourite works in the show is The word of mouse (grok your cornea gumbo), a film by Thomas Goddard. Employing both moving and still archival images, it picks up the threads of Barclay and Sheridan Jr, in that the theme is one of the pressures and messaging we are subject to in our day-to-day lives. Here, it is the realm of digital culture and the split between on- and offline life that comes under scrutiny. Old TV pizza restaurant ads proliferate, as we passively watch, perhaps feeling our tummies rumble. When these are replaced with a multitude of social media food posts, with the attendant ‘likes’, ‘hearts’, smile and frown emojis, there is almost a pang of nostalgia for simpler, more passive times: “this is what you like because we tell you to like it.”

How little we anticipated a world in which #food and #yummy would proliferate quite so much. The visuals are accompanied by an original and effective – occasionally sinister – soundtrack, with hints of ASMR, although not gratuitously. (I make this point because ASMR’s recent usage is becoming so ubiquitous in contemporary art as to risk terminal fatigue.) A thought-provoking film that highlights the gulf in difference between the virtual and ‘real’, the quick, choppy edits (also featuring nature alongside the virtual) means a bigger, subjective picture, must be pieced together by the viewer, depending on particular experience. The film closes with the line “Close your eyes, it’s time for us to dream,” perhaps warning that, despite appearances to the contrary, we are in danger of sleepwalking through the lives we inhabit.

Dominating Gallery 3 is the in your face boldness of Rae-Yen Song’s Happy Happy Leaf, a kinetic sculpture that is suggestive of new age religious iconography. With hungry gnashing teeth in a mouth where its belly should be (the inside of which is decadently gold in colour), breasts for eyes – or vice versa – and udders, beneath it sits a pot, containing who knows what. it is an incongruous and beautiful thing. The centrepiece for an “as-yet unrealised array of objects, documents and practices” assembled in a celebration of music and dance, I look forward to seeing more. Nearby, Frank Wasser’s 02.11.20 looks into the future via the pages of tabloid freesheet the Metro. It’s a brave decision on the part of the Bluecoat to have its mocked-up front page facing the window, no doubt catching the eye of many a passer by less interested in art as they are in the sensationalist headline, which screams “Trump Assassinated.” Arguably a cheap shot, it is nevertheless well executed, pardon the pun, and timely (Trump just confirmed his decision to run for the next presidency), and one wonders how many people quickly googled the headline to check its veracity.

Ascending the stairs into Gallery 4 and the final section of the show, the room has a theatrical air. Hazel Brill’s floor bound We gathered around the puddle, smiling patiently hints at the therapeutic quality of water and nature, even when their setting is an urban one. On the wall behind, Emma Cousins’ mural and framed drawings make up Arpeggios, a tribute of sorts to bodily frailty. The simply rendered figures do a lot with a little, their faltering forward motion suggesting a kind of acknowledgement of the human condition. A pair of headphones hang from a stage-set of sorts in Milly Peck’s Landing Good Sync Will Pay Dividends. On the soundtrack, food is noisily munched, Sellotape unspooled and plates clatter resoundingly in a work inspired by the anonymous Foley artists who produce sound effects for film, TV, radio et al. This peek behind the curtain of post-production ingenuity that we rarely otherwise consider makes for a playful endpoint to Survey.

With the ostensible unifying factor being the works’ inclusion by nomination, you necessarily have to judge each almost in isolation, rather than wondering about thematic decisions regarding their suitability to appear together. There are, however, commonalities running throughout, sprinkled like curatorial breadcrumbs, allowing the visitor to make their own connections and observations. A time capsule of sorts, it is at once a showcase and a kind of challenge – it will be interesting to see the respective responses, how and whether those included develop.

Mike Pinnington  

Survey @ the Bluecoat closes 23 June

Images from top: Survey installed @ Jerwood Space, London, courtesy Anna Arca; Chris Alton, A Hollywood Film, in which Climate Change is Averted and Emma Cousins, Arpeggios (both photographed by MP)

Our pick of this week’s (very chatty) arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – Pin Cushion (2017) 8.35pm @ HOME Manchester — £9/7/5

This twisted fairytale/coming-of-age debut by British female director Deborah Haywood opened Venice Critics’ Week to much fanfare; and the title, according to Hayward, refers to the person behind the ‘school slag’. Part of HOME’s Birds Eye View female film season.

Wednesday – Raising Sparks Book Launch With Ariel Kahn 6.30pm @ Waterstones, Liverpool One — £3

It sounds like a dream come true: Ariel Kahn submits his contemporary fiction debut, Raising Sparks, to Writing on the Wall’s Pulp Idol novel writing competition; makes the final; and as a result, Raising Sparks is published by Bluemoose Books and is seen on the shelves of Waterstones. In conversation with Mike Morris, co-director of Writing on the Wall, tonight, expect Kahn’s take on success, and the novel’s tale of religion, and – ultimately – friendship.

Thursday — Book Launch: Shouldn’t Throw Stones 6-7.30pm @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool — FREE

Photographer Kevin Casey has been working as a night watchman for the past couple of years at a very unusual location: the Grade-listed, largely abandoned Pilkington’s Glass factory (above). A monument to St Helens’ industrial past, hear more tonight from Casey and me (TDN editor and Open Eye critical-writer-in-residence), as we talk about ghosts and creative viewpoints within industrial ruin.

The Liverpool Premiere Of Balls: A Film By Lily Cole With Q&A 6.30pm @ FACT, Liverpool — £6/5

If there was a 95% chance your baby would die if they stayed with you, would you try to give them away? Model, actress, History of Art graduate and director Lily Cole premieres her new short fiction film tonight, entitled Balls (still, below), based on the real heartbreaking stories behind Victorian foundlings. Hear Cole discuss the film’s issues tonight with playwright Bonnie Greer O.B.E, author Michael Stewart, and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, Simon Marsden.

Friday — Minton Tile Floor Reveal 10am-5pm @ St George’s Hall, Liverpool — £3 OTD

You hear about this growing up in Liverpool but rarely get the chance to see it in person: over 30,000 beautiful tiles, typically covered and protected since it was first installed in 1852, in the concert room of St George’s Hall. Don’t miss this astonishing example of Victorian design, open to the public for just a short period of time from now until 12 August, as part of Liverpool Biennial 2018.

Birmingham Open Studios 6pm Til Late @ Venues Across Birmingham — FREE

It’s the Digbeth First Friday and the city’s artists are opening warehouse and factory doors for you to peep inside, have a drink and talk about what they’re up to. Highlights include Grand Union’s (below) summer party and a new exhibition by GU Women, a new Birmingham-based female collective; experimental sound festival Ideas of Noise, at The Edge, Vivid Projects, and Birmingham City University; and a group show from The Jubilee Trade Centre Artists at The Showcase Gallery.

Saturday – Surrealist Writing Workshop 10.30am-3pm @ The Hepworth Wakefield –£40/30 Members

To coincide with their current exhibition by surrealist painter and novelist Leonora Carrington, this special workshop by author Clare Fisher will challenge and help you to go wild with creative writing techniques; channeling Carrington’s expressive poetry and storytelling. Read Joanna Moorhead on Carrington here.

Artist Talk: Ryan Gander 11am-12pm @ Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral — FREE

He’s collaborated with children from Knotty Ash Primary School to make the modernist chairs you can currently see at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Today, Ryan Gander (below) discusses his experience with Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Liverpool John Moores University, Dominic Wilkinson. Read more about Gander’s “bonkers method of teaching” here.

Laura Robertson

Images: feature, Lily Newmark as Iona in Pin Cushion, 2017; from top: image by Kevin Casey, part of the series Shouldn’t Throw Stones: View of a Night Watchman, 2017; still from Balls, 2018; Grand Union studios, Birmingham; Ryan Gander, Liverpool Biennial 2018, image courtesy Pete Carr

It’s a festival frenzy this week, with all eyes on Liverpool. In short, if you’ve never visited the city before, then this is the week to do so…

Thursday — Launch Night: Independents Biennial 6pm @ George Henry Lee’s Building, Liverpool – FREE

Under new management via ArtinLiverpool’s Patrick Kirk-Smith, with a new identify and full of beans, the city’s fringe festival is back – thankfully – with a bang. It’s a huge umbrella strand for all sorts of artist-led events, from the traditional to the downright eccentric, running co-currently alongside the official Liverpool Biennial from July-October 2018 (see Friday’s launch). Have a look at the website for the exhaustive programme; if painting’s your bag, for example, see CBS Gallery’s Please Slow Down, Luke George in the Baltic Triangle; or skip past the Aldi in St Johns Market to experience the Reading Room, Kids That Fly or the Royal College of Art. As with the Biennial, it’s a fantastic way to explore the city.

However, it’s George Henry Lee’s that we’re most looking forward to visiting: the former department store will be hosting the Empty Spaces Cinema, two strong exhibitions from Redeye’s Photography Network (Disparity Collective, Positions of Power, and Unio Collective: Hidden Worlds); a painting show inspired by Finnegans Wake (A Long The Riverrun), and graduate award exhibitions from Hope and Liverpool John Moores universities. Great stuff.

Exhibition Opening: This Is Shanghai/China Dream 6pm @ Cunard Building, Tate Liverpool Mann Island, Museum of Liverpool — FREE

Twinned with Shanghai since 1999, and with the oldest Chinese population in Europe, it’s no surprise that China is one focus of Liverpool’s cultural programming this year – 10 years on from our European Capital of Culture win. What you may not know is that Liverpool benefits from expertise in contemporary Chinese art, as the University of Liverpool and Open Eye Gallery have been collaborating with Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) and the University of Salford Art Collection. So far in the China Dream programme, the city’s had the Terracotta Warriors, the Chinese New Year festival and PRESENCE: A Window into Chinese Contemporary Art.

The latest exhibition, This is Shanghai, seems to be focussed on the everyday encounters that contemporary artists have observed about Liverpool and Shanghai; comparing and contrasting how we live now. We particularly love the sensitive and melancholy photography of Liang Yue; known for depicting familiar, empty streets and landscapes (On the Bridge), sometimes turned a very unfamiliar yellow/grey by sand storms blown in from the desert (Several Dusks). Also, Xu Zhen’s finess video is a must-see: entitled Physique of Consciousness, and produced by MadeIn Company, it promises to be “the first cultural fitness exercise ever made”, reflecting “the diversity of human ideologies”. See the main exhibition until 7 September.

Friday – Launch Night: Liverpool Biennial 6pm @ Venues Across Liverpool — FREE

“Beautiful world, where are you?” seems an apt title for this 10th edition Liverpool Biennial, considering the utter shit show of global (and national) politics right now. 40 artists from 22 countries attempt to respond, from despair to hope and defiance, with a healthy does of humour thrown in for good measure. See an Agnès Varda retrospective at FACT (in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, too, on Friday), Mohamed Bourouissa’s ‘resilience’ garden in Toxteth, Taus Makhacheva’s pop-up spa at Blackburn House, Ryan Gander’s collaboration with school children at Liverpool Cathedral, the tradition-defying drawings of Canadian Inuk Annie Pootoogook at Tate… You’ll find huge names from the art world attempting to tell their own stories within the context of a city well versed in resistance tales.

Alongside the official programming, you’ll also be able to check out the Independents Biennial (see Thursday), the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Gallery (whose winner will also be announced on Thursday), and fresh blood from the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018 at Liverpool School of Art & Design (with work selected by Benedict Drew, Katy Moran and Keith Piper). Festival continues until 28 October.

Saturday — Brazilica Festival 12pm-4am @ Venues Across Liverpool — FREE

Launching on Thursday with Brasilia band Muntchako at Constellations, and then a Carnival Queen competition at Circo on Friday, the main event that everyone will be talking about is really today: the 11^thanniversary festival on the Pier Head (12–8pm). Expect live performances of Brazilian/Afro Latin music from Sueli G, Agathe Iracema, electronic quartet Penya, The Fontanas, and Aleh Ferreira, plus DJs all day.

In the evening (from 8pm), head back into the city centre for a Carnival Parade; with sensational costumes, feathers, more music and – of course – dancing from Abercromby Square to Williamson Square.

For those of you fuelled up on Pineapple cocktails, the samba party bangs on through Camp and Furnace (until 4am). Everyone else can sit back and enjoy Brazilica Film Festival from Monday (until 26 July) at various venues across the city; screening eight films including 2016 biopic Elis, about the rise and fall of the greatest Brazilian singers of all time, Elis Regina.

Laura Robertson

Images, from top: Annie Pootoogook, Cherie Grist, Xu Zhen and MadeIn Company, Mohamed Bourouissa, Brasilica 

For the upcoming Liverpool festival of contemporary art, Ryan Gander has been collaborating with kids from Knotty Ash Primary School. And they’ve been teaching him a thing or two about imagination in the process, finds Emily Speed…

As I head inside to meet with Ryan Gander at Knotty Ash Primary School, I find him in the corridor surrounded by a captivated team of staff from the school newspaper, who are conducting their own interview. “What’s your favourite colour?” one child asks. Blue is the reply, followed by a pause, and then a detailed explanation about how blue is the colour of the sky and therefore endlessness. The children nod seriously and I have an inkling that Gander’s special brand of complex simplicity is something to which children respond well.

Gander, who is originally from nearby Chester, is here to produce Time Moves Quickly, a new commission for Liverpool Biennial 2018. It is described as a collaborative work with five children from Knotty Ash Primary school: Jamie Clark, Phoebe Edwards, Tianna Mehta, Maisie Williams and Joshua Yates. During this year’s Biennial festival, Gander will exhibit a series of bench-like sculptures in the grounds of the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, artworks that will be part of a group show at the Bluecoat, and a film documenting the whole process. He doesn’t know exactly what it will all look like yet, but what he does tell me is that it is inspired by Montessori methodology: or in layman’s terms, hands-on learning. The work has involved a series of exercises in order for the children to create and design 3D forms; for example, throwing multicoloured Cuisenaire Rods, blindfolded, to create abstract compositions.

“The work is to read what this bonkers-ness is”, Gander says. “In everything that is illogical and abstract, there is another logic after that, that you can pull from it.”

Gander describes how he has then taken on the same task as he has set the children. “The film we’ve been making the last few days is me turning the tables and applying the same principles as I set for them, on myself. Seeing if I could do it.” As he outlines the rules and framework he has put in place for the children, I begin to suspect that he is very much the chief collaborator in the process.

The school has a lovely atmosphere and I can see how excited the young people are to have Gander around. He seems genuinely happy to be there too and has clearly built up a rapport. ‘The school have been amazing”, he says; “they’ve let us do whatever we want. They’ve completely had faith in what we’re doing and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without that freedom.

“What I really respect is they know so much about teaching, but they’re completely open to us doing this completely ad hoc, weird, illogical abstract, bonkers method of teaching.”

Throughout our meeting, Gander tells anecdotes about the children, including being told a story devised after they saw his own Set In Stone typeface, and the astonishing ability of the children to think not only through time and space, but also fiction and parallel worlds. I ask Gander what he thinks the long term impact of Time Moves Quickly might be for them. Unexpectedly, he isn’t at all keen that they go into the arts themselves, saying there are already too many people at art school. Better, he states, that art schools have “creative fire-fighters or creative car-mechanics” as their alumni. “The best bits of working with these kids”, he continues, “is when I see in their faces the realisation that anything is possible. That is amazing, seeing that.”

Despite having worked with his daughter many times, this is the first time Gander has worked with Primary school children in an educational setting. Although it’s probably too early to tell, I ask the same of him: what does he think the impact of working with these young people will be?

“It’s challenging working with the kids, because you can’t apply the same strategies to all of them – they are all different, different humans, good at different things and working in different ways. They are all surprising. It reminds me to change perspective as often as possible.”

Another legacy of the project is going to be a digital resource, so that other educators can use the methodology themselves. Polly Brannan, Education Curator at Liverpool Biennial, talks animatedly about how valuable that part of the work is. “Ryan’s looking at materials that they might usually use for counting and using them for art, so you have all the teachers coming in, who haven’t been very confident in art, saying how they really want to use it in their own class… From Ryan’s project, we have a whole curriculum around Maths… Not just art.”

Gander describes to me the affordable, editioned set of wooden building blocks, which will hopefully be another outcome for the project (get behind me and my son in the queue, please) and how these could potentially have the most reach.

“Benches are good, benches are a fantastic thing to do, but things carry on from the building blocks. It gives people the ability to shift perspective and have empathy, to see things from different viewpoints, to understand micro/micro but not just in scale, in time, in relationships, everything.

“To have an overview of everything and that is what the world needs really right now. It seems like an insignificant thing, but it’s actually a massive thing. When you see a building you can – if you daydream enough – you can dissect it in to a load of pieces and reassemble them in your imagination, to make anything. Your imagination is so powerful.”

Emily Speed

See Time Moves Quickly at the Bluecoat and at Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral during Liverpool Biennial 2018: Beautiful world, where are you?  from 14 July – 28 October 2018 — FREE

See Emily Speed’s redesign of Bootle Library, as part of the Possibilities Club, from 2-4.30pm, Monday 18 June 2018 (FREE, drop in) — with participating school children doing part of the unveiling. Refreshments provided

Ryan Gander, Time Moves Quickly, workshop 2018. Top image courtesy Brian Roberts, middle image courtesy Ryan Gander

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 most of it’s free!

Tuesday – Christmas Lectures 11.30am & 2.30pm @ Storyhouse, Chester – FREE (Booking Required)

O Magnum Mysterium! Join University of Chester Professor (and composer) Darren Sproston this morning to discover what it is about Christmas music that makes it Christmassy; and in the afternoon, expect rock anthems with Programme Leader for BA Popular Music Performance, Dr Ruth Dockwray, to analyse why anthemic Christmas songs are so fun to sing along to.

Wednesday – Exhibition Opening: Thomas Bock And Edmund Clark 6–8pm @ Ikon Gallery, Birmingham – FREE

Two wildly different exhibitions launch at Ikon today with one thing in common: prison. Born in Birmingham, Thomas Bock (c.1793–1855) was sentenced to transportation to Australia at the age of 30, where he became a “convict artist”; painting portraits of criminals, including the cannibal Alexander Pearce. More recently, Edmund Clark has been undertaking an artist-in-residence (on behalf of Ikon) at Europe’s only entirely therapeutic prison, HMP Grendon, in Buckinghamshire. Expect photography (pictured, above), video and installation around incarceration and its deep effects.

Thursday – Work – Life Conference 11am–4pm @ The Art House, Wakefield – FREE

Aimed at graduating fine art students, join a bunch of expert speakers today to prepare for life post-uni – including Glen Stoker, Co-Director of Airspace Gallery (based in Stoke-on-Trent), Nick Kaplony, Artquest, Rebecca Huggan, Programme Director at The NewBridge Project (Newcastle), David Gilbert, Programme Producer at The Art House, plus alumni from The Art House Graduate Residency programme.

A Lecture With Anna Barham – *further studies* 6.30—8pm @ The Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE

The first in a series of artist lectures from the pop-up fs free school, expect a one-off illustrated lecture by London-based video artist Anna Barham (above). It’s bound to be an entertaining and personal look at her practise – which features structures that choreograph the relationships between audiences, screens and speakers.

Friday – TRS Lock In 6pm Til Late @ The Royal Standard, Liverpool – £4

Who loves a pub quiz? We do! Going back to their roots, The Royal Standard tonight pay homage to the disused Toxteth pub that they started out in… Expect bingo, darts, pub grub and art prizes – including special editions and original artworks by studio members. All profits will be ploughed into their new home in the Baltic Triangle.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Saturday – Baskerville – A Sherlock Holmes Mystery 7.30pm @ Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool – £30–10

“They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” Join Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson for a riotous adaptation by the Everyman & Playhouse team of The Hound of The Baskervilles, with five actors working up a sweat by bringing 42 characters to life. Has the curse of the Baskervilles struck again? Will the hound be stopped before the next heir to Baskerville Hall can be saved?

Sunday – LAST DAY: Everything At Once 12—6pm @ Store Studios, 180 The Strand, London – FREE

With a title taken from John Cage’s 1966 quote that “Nowadays everything happens at once and our souls are conveniently electronic (omniattentive)”, Lisson Gallery are certainly celebrating their 50^th birthday with some panache. Don’t miss this superstar group show featuring Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, Tony Cragg, Ryan Gander, Susan Hiller, Anish Kapoor and many more.

Laura Robertson, Editor

Images, from top: Edmund Clark, In Place of Hate (2017). Detail. Image courtesy of Edmund Clark, Ikon and Flowers Gallery. Anna Barham, Liquid Liquid, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2015. Poster, Baskerville – A Sherlock Holmes Mystery @ Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool. Installation View, Everything at Once ‘Everything at Once’ Lisson Gallery x Vinyl Factory

Ryan Gander talks us through his curation of the Arts Council Collection’s 70^th anniversary show, Night in the Museum — where the artworks gaze back…

In Ryan Gander’s current exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Night in the Museum, all the artworks are looking at each other. So instead of entering the gallery to look at the works, the viewer is suddenly faced with things looking at other things; either ignoring the visitors completely, or (worse) making you feel like they’re watching you as you turn your back (hence the cheeky reference to Ben Stiller’s blockbuster film of a similar name). The gallery is animated with sculptures and paintings suddenly coming to life after years of living in dusty archives. The show starts a line of thought about what the artworks would say about each other if they could speak. It’s a shift in perspective, which is what Gander is good at, and recalls the mechanical cartoon eyes of Magnus Opus (2013).

Night in the Museum is a worthy — and touring — celebration of the Arts Council Collection’s (ACC) 70^th birthday, featuring over thirty of their artists — including Angela Bulloch, Patrick Caulfield, Don Brown, Jacob Epstein, Liam Gillick, Roger Hiorns, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Kerry Stewart, and Rebecca Warren – plus Gander’s new commission, As old as time itself, slept alone (2016), in which he re-imagines Edgar Degas’ The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (1880-81) in different stages of her life, against a blue cube.

The Double Negative: Hi Ryan! Tell us more about the pairings.

Ryan Gander: I had the idea that these two works would – in a conceptualised way – become a single work. So, each pairing, when you look at them, you don’t look at the pairs individually anymore. They become a work of two parts, by two artists, by this forced proximity.

I particularly enjoyed the Frank Dobson [Portrait Bust of Lady Keynes (Lydia Lopokova) (1924)] and Roger Hiorns [Nunhead (2004)] pairing – she seems completely enamoured with the glistening copper sulphate of the Hirons sculpture.

It’s funny; the artist has their own themes and perspectives in the construction of the work; but when you put them together, they still have those themes and perspectives that the artist originally intended for them, but they take on another meaning in their pairings. So, for example the Don Brown [Yoko XX (2007)] looking at the David Hockney [We Two Boys Together (1961)]: Brown’s is a sculpture of Yoko, his wife, so obviously the woman he’s in love with, so there’s some sort of reference to sexuality there. And the Hockney is a very early painting, made when he first came out as being gay. He showed it, then took it back to the studio, and that’s when he wrote the text on it and gave it the title, which alludes to his sexuality. So in this pairing, it takes on a whole new meaning, of the two works together.

It’s a very political show in a way, as I’m using artists’ work in a way that they may not have intended. They’ve (or their estate) all agreed to be in the show, and the curatorial premise of the show, and thought that the collisions were interesting. It’s an exhibition on a multitude of levels; its an exhibition on the role of the spectator in the space; its an exhibition of the ACC; its an exhibition of quite formal, figurative sculpture on relation to abstract, colour-field-based work… it’s fun.

I recently interviewed frieze editor Jennifer Higgie about her Paintings of People ACC exhibition, and she discussed how difficult it was to select works from such a massive collection, and how she set rules for herself in order to make the process a little easier. How did you decide on the rules you would use to make the selection, and these particular pairings?

Curatorally, and in space, physically, with Natalie [Rudd, Senior Curator, ACC]. Because they each have a gaze, and each gaze is in a certain direction, or at a certain height. Some go together and some don’t go together. If you look at the David Batchelor [I Love King’s Cross and King’s Cross Loves Me, 5 (2001)] over there [points], and the figure looking down [Uli Nimptsch, Seated Figure (1951)] (pictured, above centre), she was the only figure that could work as there wasn’t another figure looking down at the floor. So it sorts itself out. It really is auto-curation; but not to the point of chance.

I curated a show at Tate Britain called The Way In Which It Landed [2008]. They have these screens that pull out where they store all their work, and I just picked, using a dice, two of the screens, then asked them to hang both of these screens the way they were in storage, as a salon hang. And some were on their side and upside down; featuring jumps through time and history and schools and genres and geographical jumps. And this [Night in the Museum] is kind of like that. There’s sort of time travel implied, because you get the ultra contemporary, looking at the modern, looking at the antiquity.

There’s a social gulf between some of these works, too: like you mention Hockney’s We Two Boys Together, made six years before homosexuality was decriminalised.

Mmm. There are also a few things I added that weren’t in the collection: the video by Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres [Sing Like Baldessari (Freestyle) (2004)], being looked at by The Little Sea Maiden [Frances Darlington (1905)] – I knew I wanted that in. It’s tongue in cheek… You can’t squash things together like this in the real world. There will be new things when the show goes to Birmingham – it’ll change a little bit each time throughout the tour.

With all that in mind, what type of questions did you have to ask yourself about the collection, given it is celebrating its 70th year? Or did you just concentrate on your own wishlist?

In a way, both were in mind. Essentially, it came down to the list of figurative works, and all the blue works, and it’s based on what I want to see. There’s no point being democratic about it; it had to come down to what I wanted to look at.

So there were no requests or rules from the ACC team?

Oh no. They called me up and asked me to do it, and I said: “Ohhh, sounds like a big job, will I get paid?” [Laughs] It’s been really good fun. I love doing things in the North, because I’m from here [Gander was born in Chester, studied in Manchester, taught at Leeds Met and Sheffield Hallam].

Which pairing did you enjoy the most?

It’s got to be the Kerry Stewart [Untitled (Lucy) (1996), staring at Garth Evans' Blue No. 30 (1964)] (below). When I was 16 years old, the British Art Show was in Manchester. My dad took me. It was the year with Damien Hirst and Gary Hulme, and Kerry Stewart, and she was really big then, but you don’t hear much about her much anymore. She still makes work, I know she teaches, and we did a residency together at Grisedale. So when I saw this in the collection, [I thought] this is just great. It refers to early man and woman, and obviously about human development; of intellect and creativity. She’s the one to me that alludes the most to what would art say if it spoke? If the objects came to life, like in the film [Night at the Museum]. [Laughs]

And what would Lucy say if she was able to speak?

I haven’t got a clue. I think I’m posing the question for other people to think about.

What interested me about the exhibition idea was that all sense of being self-conscious in the gallery, for whatever reason, somehow dissipates when you enter, and see all the works ignoring you, looking at each other.

It’s true. I think a lot of people, when they enter a gallery with the history and the elitism, they feel very self-conscious. But if you’re in here on your own, you’re not on your own, if you know what I mean.

Well, that’s true – they might turn round to look at you when you’re not looking! I have to ask you about this contentious quote that you gave in a BBC interview in 2014: “Painting is an illogical act”. Given the amount of paintings in this show, is the quote coming back to haunt you?

Painting is very illogical. It’s based in logic when you relate it to history, of course, because then there’s a reason to do it. Artworks that are not necessarily about the frivolous, self-satisfaction of painting, are very different to artworks that investigate the history of painting. It almost gives them a reason for them to exist.

Laura Robertson, Editor

See Night in the Museum: Ryan Gander Curates the Arts Council Collection at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 16 October 2016 — FREE

Night in the Museum continues from 26 November 2016-12 February 2017 at The Gas Hall, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; and then from 25 February 2017-21 May 2017 at The Attenborough Centre, Leicester — see the ACC website for details

Do artists based in the North of England have an inferiority complex? And what would Venice Biennale look like if it was based in Warrington? We find out from the lead curator of NORTH Contemporary, Will Lunn…

London-based gallerist Will Lunn has just launched NORTH: a brand new festival representing contemporary art from the North of England, through focus exhibitions, talks and pavilions. Closely partnered with Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival, NORTH will occupy multiple venues across the city next month; from the Pyramid Art Centre to station platforms and ex-retail units (including a former bank).

Highlighting ambitious institutions outside London through its pavilions — including pop-up gallery MODEL (Liverpool), S1 gallery (Sheffield), Bureau gallery (Manchester) and Platform A arts space (Middlesbrough) – NORTH also brings together an impressive set of artwork for its main focus exhibition, The Dream Of Modern Living? – from Joe Scanlan’s DIY coffins to Ryan Gander’s re-purposed Ikea furniture.

We spoke to Lunn about curating the festival, Northern ‘identity’, and being influenced by the Venice Biennale…

On coming up with the idea of NORTH:

“Warrington Contemporary Art Festival wanted to bring us in as guest curators, but I couldn’t see what could be done to move things forward without damaging the benefits to local people of the existing offering. There was also a feeling of being overshadowed by Liverpool and Manchester and that it could not compete with events like the Liverpool Biennial. This was oddly quite inspiring. There’s always something that can be done – something bigger and better than seems possible in the current situation.”

On being the first to establish a contemporary art festival focused solely on the North:

“A few of the [Northern arts] institutions we have spoken with were thinking along similar same lines, even bouncing around the same name, but looking towards funding applications to be realised a fair way into the future. If we had done things differently and planned out NORTH as a funding application from the beginning, we probably could have up-scaled things significantly but that would have meant waiting. We hope that in the future we can work with these other like-minded organisations to bring about something even bigger and better.

“The great thing about seizing the opportunity here in Warrington has been speed. It’s going to kick things off for NORTH while the time is right, not two years later; and I hope it will also boost what is already being done in Warrington, where hosting the events might have greater impact than on one of the larger cities. We are trying to do the absolute maximum possible with the resources that we’ve got, now.”

On referencing the Venice Biennale, and what pavilions for the North of England could look like:

“Some of The Venice Biennale left a sour taste this year… it just left me feeling a bit hollow. I was on the plane back thinking how lovely it would be to go somewhere really low-key, like an old shop, and find it had been taken over by, say, ‘The Newcastle Pavilion’. To find something great in a very humble setting, something surprising that you never expected to be there. It is my strong belief that you don’t need masses of money to make a good project.”

On being a Londoner who is running a festival about the arts outside of London:

“The idea is not to come up from London and tell everyone in the North how to do it. This year is not about saying: ‘This a defining show for the whole of the North of England’ — not at all. It is just about trying to draw together as many people as possible to show off some of the strengths across the whole of the contemporary arts scene.”

On inspiring artists who live in Warrington to be more ambitious:

“Above all else, we wanted to inspire people who feel disheartened about the possibilities for contemporary art in the North, particularly in Warrington. From our research, many local artists don’t feel that like they can get a career and move forward.

Take [NORTH’s other focus exhibition] Business As Usual, for example: over 100 artists submitting works the size of a business card, realised by a young artist called Perce Jerrom with almost no budget at all… Hopefully something to inspire people who don’t feel as if they have the necessary resources.”

On the preconceptions of the ‘Northern artist’:

“It’s become apparent during the making of this festival that my gut feeling was right – that there’s still a sense, for some, of feeling slightly ashamed of, or hiding ‘Northern-ness’ outside the North of England… I realised as I grew up that members of my family who had moved South had consciously dropped their accents… It’s been interesting for me to talk to so many artists and arts professionals across the North and it is great to see people starting to really ‘own their roots’ — take Ryan Gander for example: Cheshire-born, Manchester-educated, and now proudly giving back as a supporter of Castlefield [Gallery, Manchester].”

On framing NORTH’s main focus exhibition, The Dream of Modern Living?, on Ikea, who opened their first UK store in Warrington in 1987:

“People would go, drop their kids in the crèche, get a coffee, and look at some ‘crazy’ foreign design, then leave via the giftshop. That would be the family day out. And if you think of it as a model, although the stuff is for sale, the presentation and the way things are organised at Ikea is not so different to a public museum or institution.

“I wanted something that would engage local people, so we asked them what they thought of when they thought of Warrington. It was amazing how many people talked about Ikea. Paul Carey-Kent [The Dream of Modern Living? curator and art critic]… and I thought this would be the perfect way to try to engage people who may not go to a contemporary art exhibition otherwise.”

On his ‘day job’ running commercial gallery Copperfield, based near Tate Modern and Jerwood (London):

“For the most part, I would describe the gallery as a commercially funded public gallery. For example, one of our recent exhibitions examined contemporary artists’ use of law. This was hardly a commercially-driven show in itself, but additionally we had a round table discussion with leading artists and academics that was free to attend and totally packed.

“I like public programming and I do my job running Copperfield principally for the love of curating exhibitions. However, wherever possible I prefer to be generating my own revenue streams to ensure longevity and to avoid stakeholders and sponsors being in a position to negatively impact exhibitions with their own agendas. It is important where ever possible to have the option to say no to things when they just aren’t right.”

On whether the artwork in NORTH will be for sale:

“Venice is, theoretically, a non-commercial biennale of non-commercial presentations; yet it is heavily market-led, and people clearly make sales off the back of it quite directly… [In NORTH] I don’t care whether work sells or not… At the same time, I have no intention of preventing artists and organisations from making private sales; I understand for many it is a necessary lifeline that sustains their work.

“I will be trying to bring in collectors from the North as well as some from London and the South of England. I want to get collectors involved, because they’re part of the picture and, like Manchester Contemporary, I think they are part of the future for the North.”

On attracting international audiences, no matter where you’re from:

“Much of Copperfield’s market is international, in part due to the rise of art fairs and the increasing globalisation of contemporary art. I recently did Art Brussels with Nat from Division of Labour, and its great to see him doing so much around the world from his base outside London, in Worcester. I think that galleries in the North can be quite powerful within the fairs scene simply because they can offer something different, something new.”

On the main message out of NORTH:

“It would be naïve not to look outside one’s own bubble in any situation… locally at least the festival is trying to say: ‘Look, if you want to you can do anything, anywhere; it’s just a matter of how big you want to dream and how hard you want to work.’”

Laura Robertson

North Contemporary launches Friday 2 October 2015 and runs until Saturday 31 October 2015. See here for full exhibition, pavilion and talks information — free entry

North is run in partnership with Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival 2015, which will include performance, music, theatre, exhibitions and events – including the Art and Photography Opens. See it Friday 2 October to Saturday 31 October 2015 — free entry

Images, from top: Ryan Gander, Samsons Push or Compositie. Photo courtesy Ken Adlard; Will Lunn at Copperfield Gallery, London; Business As Usual exhibition, North: curated by Perce Jerrom; Joe Scanlan, DIY (2003) Ikea parts, offset ink on paper, fresh flowers arrangement variable, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 

Read Laura Robertson on Northern art and soul: Warrington festival addresses north-south divide (a-n news)

‘Nice rebellion, welcome in’: Liz Mitchell visits a provocative and timely exhibition challenging all those who care about the state of art education, now and in the future…

It’s quiet in the Special Collections Gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University on the day I visit. Tucked away on the third floor of the university library at All Saints, you must pass security guards, identity checks and rows of books and computer terminals to get here. All still, now that the summer holidays have begun. But a few short weeks ago, this place was buzzing. End of term exams and the Final Year Degree Show at the Art School just over the road. People unloading curious structures from rented vans, disobeying the no-smoking signs, giggling and fretting and shrieking on the street. Energy levels were off the clock.

A few weeks earlier, students staged a sit-in at the nearby Manchester Business School. A group calling themselves Free Education MCR occupied the Harold Hankins Building in a demonstration against further education cuts, rising tuition fees and the planned transformation of the building into a £50m hotel. A statement on their Facebook page read:

‘We know what the market does to education, and we know we need to fight it. We are occupying to reclaim space from the university’s corporate projects – and to use it to educate ourselves freely.’

This kind of protest is on the rise. Earlier this year, students occupied the London School of Economics, proposing a Free University of London, run by students, lecturers and workers. New independent art schools, such as Open School East in London and Islington Mill Art Academy in Salford, offer a collaborative, socially engaged and fee-free alternative to the perceived neoliberal market ethos of university art education. Similar projects are supported by high profile contemporary artists such as Matthew Darbyshire, Ed Atkins and Ryan Gander, himself a graduate of Manchester School of Art.

But today, all is quiet. Low level ambient lighting, the background shush of air conditioning. Glass cases containing an array of archive material – pamphlets, posters, photographs  and magazines.  On first impression, they are rather beautiful; clean typography, bold graphic design, crisp printing. There is also a whiff of archive nostalgia, in the soft black fuzziness of manually typewritten text, the yellowing of cheap paper now crisped with age. But don’t be fooled by the apparently benign atmosphere – this is a Trojan horse. Get a bit closer, read the typewriter’s words. This is a call to arms. A clue lies in the vinyl lettering on a far wall:

‘You may think that the Art College is very free and easy.
But it is not…’

We Want People Who Can Draw looks back at a critical moment in the history of the art school, a moment that feels remarkably relevant in the current climate. The 1960s was a period of significant structural change in British art education. Prompted by the recommendations of the 1960 Coldstream Report, that art schools become more ‘academic’, it coincided with wider cultural and societal shifts – the emergence of Conceptual Art, the mobilisation of anti-capitalist politics, and post-structuralist debates around the very concept of knowledge. From the mid-60s, the art school became a site of protest that directly challenged establishment authority, hierarchical power structures and gender discrimination. The exhibition documents the activities of this period through its communication media. Its content is passionate, outraged, idealistic  – up close, its energy threatens to break out of the regulated spaces of display.

It begins politely enough, with a large printed broadside proclaiming ‘first things first’ in heavy black copy, the full height of the page. This is a manifesto, proposed by designers, photographers and students weary of the relentless push of consumer advertising. It calls for a socially engaged design practice that produces instruction manuals, educational aids and road signage, in place of the endless flogging of cat food, toothpaste, ‘roll-ons, pull-ons and slip-ons’. Self-published by Ken Garland in 1964, it was swiftly reproduced across art schools nationwide. A revised version was published in 1999, arguing that the situation had got worse, not better. And this is still a live document – read its current manifestation at firstthingsfirst2014.org.

Further in, the tone is more strident. There is a two-page typewritten statement by university art librarian Ron Hunt. Written for a 1968 art school demonstration in Trafalgar Square, this document is furious. Rogue lines of words zigzag across the page, slicing aggressively into the main text with statements such as: ‘free election of masters does not abolish masters and slaves’; and: ‘FORGET ALL YOU HAVE EVER LEARNED: BEGIN BY DREAMING’. In the main body of the thing, Hunt asks:

‘How many more vice-chancellors and principals are going to make speeches that welcome student rebellion, and give us the old gab about the higher education establishment being built on a tradition of free speech which is still upheld?…Free speech my arse.’

Ouch. I wonder if the newly appointed VC of Manchester Metropolitan University has visited this exhibition yet.

And this is the curious thing. On the one hand this is a serious historic exhibition, drawn from a number of important archives, including Manchester’s own. It documents the notorious art school sit-in at Hornsey College of Art, which resulted in the sacking and expulsion of staff and students. It includes pamphlets and statements from the Slade School and RCA women’s groups of the 1970s, following the revolutionary politics of ‘Second Wave’ feminism. It shows how early 20th century avant-garde art was mobilised for contemporary political ends. A poster advertises Descent into the Street, an exhibition of photographs of avant-garde artworks exhibited in the Physics Department of Newcastle University in 1966.  In clean, san-serif font, it locates 1960s activism in a direct lineage from Russian Constructivism through Dada and Surrealism, with quotes from El Lissitzky, Tristan Tzara, Andre Breton and Allan Kaprow. The last is from Black Mask, a New York-based anarchist group:

‘We seek a form of action which transcends the separation between art and politics: it is the act of revolution.’

Black Mask, and similar groups such as the Parisian Situationist International and its British equivalent, King Mob, advocated the active disruption of everyday life. The exhibition’s title is a variation on a pun in a King Mob publication, Echo, in which the statement ‘We’re looking for people who like to draw’ was placed next to an image of a gun. Both Black Mask and King Mob adopted Valerie Solanas as their figurehead, after she shot Andy Warhol and art critic Mario Amaya in 1968.

And to this exhibition, located within the art school right now. Its main audience is the student and staff body. Are its curators (also students and staff) advocating the toppling of the establishment; the taking out of those deemed to have sold out? I don’t think so. But what they are doing, perhaps, is contesting ownership of a history of radicalism. Nowadays, artists are expected to be dangerous and unpredictable, it’s a commonplace of contemporary practice. As Grayson Perry put it in his Reith Lecture: ‘nice rebellion, welcome in’. There is no escaping the market. But, as one of the exhibition’s curators put it, these artefacts reflect moments when students and staff refused to accept the limitations of established experience:

‘The most radical thing they did was ask the questions that according to the given order of the art school were not meant to be their questions.’

Is this what the art school should be for then? To enable the framing of new questions, new possibilities, regardless of whether or not you have permission? To provide time that is not measured, quantified and allocated in market-bound units, but (as another member of staff put it) that enables you to go out and measure puddles and realise it is a valid occupation? Maybe even an important one? These are the kinds of questions We Want People Who Can Draw provokes.

You don’t need to be a member of the Library to visit Special Collections. But you do have to approach the security guards and ask them to let you in. The tension between content and venue in this exhibition is perhaps one of the most interesting things about it. But it would be a shame if this prevented people from seeing what seems to me a most provocative and timely challenge to all those who care about the state of art education, now and in the future.

Liz Mitchell

See We Want People Who Can Draw: Instruction and Dissent in the British Art School at Manchester Metropolitan University, Special Collections Gallery, until Friday 31 July 2015

Gallery open Monday -Friday 10am-4pm

Download the exhibition catalogue free of charge here

All images courtesy of David Penny and Manchester Metropolitan University Special Collections, apart from the second image down, which was taken from the Free Education MCR Facebook page

This article has been commissioned by the Contemporary Visual Arts Network North West (CVAN NW), as part of a regional critical writing development programme, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England —  see more here #writecritical