Exhibitions Roundup:
Three to See

Conversations.MP-web

With new year comes the inevitable expectation and planning around new exhibitions to see in the months ahead. But what of those shows already open, that remain worthy of your time? Here, Mike Pinnington selects three such Liverpool exhibitions, closing soon… 

Conversations @ Walker Art Gallery – Until 9 March

Fittingly, given the exhibition’s title, you hear Conversations  curated by Liverpool-based artist Sumuyya Khader  before ever batting an eyelid at its 40 artists’ worth of works. This is thanks to Zinzi Minott’s Bloodsound (top, 2022), from which a wall of noise spills out of booming stacked speakers. Their transparent housings are filled with red liquid – a reference to the fraught histories of those it gives such long overdue voice to: samples of personal and institutional archive; political speeches (including by Diane Abbott on the Windrush generation and subsequent scandal) and Jamaican dancehall; Pressure Drop by Toots and the Maytals. It sets the tone brilliantly for this exhibition of Black women and non-binary artists in its demand for a changing of the narratives of contemporary British art.

In sections including Power, Identity and Histories, Conversations largely introduces names with whom we should be (but often aren’t) more familiar with. So, for every Lubaina Himid, there are artists to get better acquainted with. A case in point is right next door to Minott’s work, in Nnena Kalu’s Drawing 21 (2021), which features intuitive mark-making in imperfect duplicate that I’d happily spend hours getting lost in. Joy Labinjo’s The Swimmers (2023) presents three people splashing around in a natural water source. Nothing unusual in that you might think, except to say, consider when last you saw a scene like this, one populated specifically by Black and brown bodies. Then consider why it should be an unusual picture. As Labinjo explains in an accompanying caption: “I am political because my very existence is politicised, by extension the works are too.” Similarly, in Miranda Forrester’s Unity (2023) we see two women, naked, hands clasped tenderly together; a work of and for the Queer Black female gaze.

You listen when Charmaine Watkiss‘ works speak of the immigrant experience in the UK, rendered in graphite and coloured pencil on paper. The Passengers (2020) sees a trio of noble-looking figures in what some (politicians, the broadcast media, etc.) would no doubt obsessively parrot as a ‘small boat’, troubling the imagined sanctity of this island’s murky waters. Watkiss says: “I am interested in ideas around sovereignty and what constitutes Britishness, particularly where it concerns people who were born in the Caribbean, deemed as migrants despite being born British. I wanted to reflect on how Britain benefited from their contribution.” There are echoes (of the past) and resonances with the present and for the future everywhere you look in Conversations: we should pay attention to what it and its artists have to say.

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Proximity @ Open Eye Gallery – Until 19 January

Proximity, a word denoting nearness of time, space or relationship, sees photographer Stephen McCoy reflecting on 45 years of engagement with the landscape – both urban and rural – and people of Merseyside from the late 1970s to the present day. “I have always felt that my best work shows a deep personal connection to the subject photographed, whether of people or place,” he’s said. Organised by specific series and periods, it’s both personal document and exploration of a region in flux across almost half a century.

Demolition Sites spans five years of the 1980s and captures the reshaping of inner-city spaces during that period. In these stark, foreboding concrete vistas, one can imagine feral kids at play and lone scavengers eking out a sparse existence amid a post-apocalyptic dystopia as easily as a region’s being re-imagined for the better. From roughly the same period, McCoy’s Skelmersdale photographs offer a zoomed-in snapshot of the aftermath of the Utopian 1960s new town project. River to River, meanwhile, sees his lens trained on the changes in use and perception of the rivers Mersey and Ribble. Again, in them we find a picture of post-industrial decline, whispers of once-thriving waterways consigned to memory; and yet, there is also a kind of poetry, even beauty, in the part-submerged car wrecks, abandoned Brutalist air traffic control towers and other such defunct machinery. McCoy, perhaps as a result of his being a native, brings a humanity to bear that many a photographer might otherwise struggle to muster.

Elsewhere, we find the ever more personal seeping into the picture. In Housing Estates, McCoy photographs home turf, in Ainsdale near Southport; but the works in this section are more than a reflection of ‘home’. Rather, they represent an evolution in style and approach. On one wall we find a black and white, borderline-chilling glimpse of suburbia, all geometry, shadow and line. Opposite, a jauntily arranged (though similarly humming with meaning) colour set. In these, one can’t help but read an almost Lynchian narrative of what might go on behind closed doors. We’re just missing the picket fences and strains of Blue Velvet… Upstairs, meanwhile, is the poignant Every House My Mother Lived In (ongoing). From terraced housing in Edge Hill and Kensington to a detached house in Crosby via North Wales, Greater Manchester and Ainsdale, the series builds a touching and evocative picture of a life through time, geography, home and community – themes that, in one way or another, loom large in this exhibition.

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Cosmotechnics @ FACT Liverpool – Until 26 January

There’s a lot to like about current FACT Liverpool show, Cosmotechnics – not least the pair of animatronic birds of prey (Patricia Dominguez, Rambo I, Rambo II, 2024) that stand sentinel at the entrance of the venue’s first floor gallery one, laser beams firing from their eyes as they guard the vicinity, startling passers by. (They put one in mind of a late, lost Harryhausen science fiction project.) The show takes as a departure point Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui‘s concept of the same name; to emphasise, as curator Beatrice Zaidenberg explains: “that technology’s true potential lies in its alignment with cosmologies – spiritual, ecological, and cultural understandings of the world.”

Crossing the threshold into gallery one, you’ll find a futuristic immersive environment populated by film, sculpture and installation, by Latin American artists Patricia Dominguez and Rebeca Romero. Dominguez’s related pair of films – 2024′s Tres Lunas Mas Abajo (Three Moons Below), and 2022′s Matrix Vegetal, see the artist applying her research on plants, resource extraction and healing processes, as well as her time in residence at CERN, to consider how energy connects us to other living things and objects on the planet. Romero, meanwhile, through the lens of pre-Colombian iconography, considers how new technologies might engage with, revivify and reimagine ancient belief systems thought lost to history. In complementary fashion, they explore the relationships between living species, and tech, and ask us to consider sites of worship for a coming world – whatever form that may take.

Together with collectives Atractor Studio + Semantica, whose foyer works visualise scientific ideas and data to elucidate how current industrial practices have colonised land and local populations, they look beyond well-worn Western tropes of utopian or dystopian narratives. In doing so, refreshingly, they present a third way, one which folds in and prioritises a deep engagement with the possibilities presented by an understanding of and relationship with ecologies, offering the potential of a more navigable present and brighter future.

Mike Pinnington

Images, from top: Conversations installation photography, Mike Pinnington; Proximity © Stephen McCoy, Demolition Sites; Patricia Domínguez, Tres Lunas más Abajo (Three moons Below) (2024). Analog picture captured by Emilia Martín, 2024. Commissioned by Arts at CERN with the support of Beca de Arte Botín and Cecilia Brunson Projects

Posted on 15/01/2025 by thedoublenegative