Palestinian Storytelling, World-Building, and Time Travel: Our Preview of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) 2025

The latest Liverpool Arab Arts Festival arrives this Friday. Here, Mike Pinnington takes a trip through some of 2025′s not-to-be-missed highlights… Just like that, we’re well into July, and Liverpool’s cultural calendar continues...

Pavements – Reviewed

Biopic, mock-doc, juke box musical, exhibition? Mike Pinnington considers director Alex Ross Perry’s documentary, Pavements…  Ambivalent, ironic, alienating. There is a prolonged moment at the beginning of director Alex Ross Perry’s documentary, Pavements, where...

“I’m trying to remove the structure of being watched.” In Conversation with Performance Artist Lula Braimbridge

A recent graduate set to stage performances at Stockport Garrick Theatre in July, Manchester-based queer performance artist Lula Braimbridge talks to Anna Marsden about embracing nudity, discomfort and the gaze… Usually, when it comes to...

The City & the City: Ripped Backsides – Reviewed

“City as shadow, spectre, crucible.” With Ripped Backsides, author Richard Cabut invites us on a free-wheeling trip through noir cities, finds Mike Pinnington… In Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides – aptly named for Iggy Pop’s The...

Simulacra and the City:
Stephen Clarke’s New York 1995–1996

Askance tales of a storied city, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Stephen Clarke’s record of a “brief moment” that nevertheless offers up a multi-lens cultural reckoning… It’s the city that never sleeps; the...

Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – Reviewed

Tracking a philosophical line across the city, Mike Pinnington reports on drifting purposefully through the 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial… Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK, proposes, says director Sam Lackey, to explore and expose the city’s...

Beyond Liverpool...
Blazing a trail through
the big wide world
12/01/2024
Mike Pinnington on Vallisaari island, Helsinki. Photograph by Laura Robertson

Field Trip: Helsinki, Finland – Happiness and Cultural Guardians

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...

Must hear...
The sounds of
The Double Negative
04/10/2024
Sex Swing - Golden Triangle LP Cover

God Unknown Records at 10

“I wanted to release music that I love, that really meant something. Something real.” This weekend sees God Unkinown Records mark a decade of releasing diverse, cutting-edge music from artists based all over...

Fill your boots...
unique, limited edition gifts
05/09/2019
Present Tense. Publish by The Double Negative, 2019.

Present Tense (2019) // Paperback // £14.99

Present Tense A decade since Liverpool EU Capital of Culture… What now?  Edited by Laura Robertson and Mike Pinnington ISBN 978-1-5272-4281-4 Published August 2019. Very limited edition run of 250 copies. Paperback, 96...