Culture Diary w/c 20-01-2025

Fallen-Star

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

Monday – Sexy Beast 7.45pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 Auschwitz drama The Zone of Interest saw the director garner critical acclaim resulting in five Oscar nominations. Prior to which, in 2013, he’d adapted Michel Faber’s supremely discomfiting woman who fell to Earth science fiction, Under the Skin. Hardly prolific, Glazer first came to attention getting on for 25 years ago now, with the Ray Winstone-starring ‘one last job’ gangster flick, Sexy Beast; worth revisiting – at the very least – as part of a consideration of the director’s oeuvre thus far.

Tuesday – But Does It Speak? @ the Bluecoat – FREE

This week sees the launch of new Bluecoat season, But Does it Speak?, featuring ‘artists and writers who use poetry, fiction, experimental writing and speech to establish visual worlds’. Suckers as we are for how language and text is used in a gallery setting, it’s fair to say we’re looking forward to seeing, and hearing, how this manifests. Things get underway today with poet Jennifer Lee Tsai’s theatrical film Fallen Star (top).

Wednesday – Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

With Robert Eggers’ reimagined Nosferatu continuing to draw audiences, now’s as good a time as any to further explore and reassess vampire cinema (which, of course, was established in no small part by F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original). Something of an outlier in terms of genre lore, Hammer’s Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter sees a swashbuckling Horst Janson – you guessed it – hunting vampires. Campy Hammer associations aside, the macabre Captain Kronos is worthy of consideration in the pantheon of the immortal.

Further Reading: Vampire Cinema – The First One Hundred Years

Thursday – Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown 8.40pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

A key entry in the Pedro Almodóvar canon, his 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown finds TV star Pepa Marcos’s life getting increasingly confusing and complex over a hectic 48 hours in which a chaos of mistaken identity, strange encounters and scenarios ensue.

Scorched-Earth-by-Loud-Numbers-a-sonification-of-Swedish-fire-data

Cosmotechnics Workshops with Andrea Ku + Loud Numbers 1pm/4pm @ FACT Liverpool – £7 each

Alongside a refreshing exhibition that asks us to rethink our relationship with the natural world and our place in it, FACT’s Cosmotechnics has offered a rich and varied public programme. This seems set to continue today with workshops led by artists Andrea Ku and Miriam Quick (AKA Loud Numbers). In Searching for Objects, Ku leads a tour through the city centre. Objects gathered are intended to serve as prompts for Quick’s afternoon Sonification session, turning data into sound.

Friday – Onomatoposter @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – FREE

The humble gig poster has inspired and been the site of great artworks down the years. We need look no further than (the brilliantly titled) Onomatoposter, returning to Future Yard this week, as proof.

web-Sea-Drift-by-Moonfleet_oil-on-linen-November-2020_1000x1515mmPohotograph-Douglas-Atfield

Saturday – Keith Grant in Conversation with Judith Le Grove 2pm @ the Atkinson, Southport – FREE

Born in Liverpool, Keith Grant studied at Bootle School of Art and, later, the RCA. A painter primarily associated with the natural world as his subject (see above), current exhibition Elemental Nature saw him return to Sefton for a first showing at a UK gallery since the 90s. Now 94, catch him in conversation about his work with his biographer Judith Le Grove.

Stop Making Sense 8.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

The greatest concert film of all time? Stop Making Sense is certainly up there. Capturing Talking Heads at the peak of their powers, it overflows with energy, innovation and – of course – an incredible repertoire of songs. Directed by Jonathan Demme, it’s memorable not least for David Byrne’s stage presence (the showmanship, the suits, the moves!).

Sunday – Last Chance to See: Cosmotechnics @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

This show finds Latin American artists and collectives Patricia Dominguez and Rebeca Romero, Atractor Studio + Semantica, looking beyond Western tropes of utopia and/or dystopia, and is infused with an understanding of and relationship with ecologies. Presenting work that asks us to consider a different, more navigable present, and brighter future, it makes for a rethink of our place on spaceship Earth.

Read our review 

Cléo from 5 to 7 5pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Pre-dating the French New Wave with La Pointe Courte (her 1954 debut is said by some to have ushered in the nouvelle vague) and, indeed, outlasting it, director Agnès Varda’s second feature Cléo from 5 to 7 finds singer Cléo Victoire anxiously passing time, awaiting the results of a biopsy. Shot in real time and flitting from colour to monochrome, this being the FNW and this being Varda, Victoire’s fate is only half the story.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: Fallen Star still; Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter 4K restoration trailer; Scorched Earth, Loud Numbers: a sonification of Swedish fire data; Keith Grant, Sea Drift by Moonfleet, 2020. Photograph, Douglas Atfield; Stop Making Sense trailer

Posted on 20/01/2025 by thedoublenegative