Culture Diary w/c 17-02-2025
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…
Monday – Squid 7pm @ Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool – £22.50
Brighton experimental post-punks tour new record, Cowards; with dark narrative themes addressing the nature of evil itself, here we find the five-piece edging into narrative proggy hinterlands.
Tuesday – Exhibitions Continue: Ding Yi: Between Prediction and Retrospection; Vanessa da Silva: Roda Viva @ Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno – FREE
Llandudno’s Mostyn Gallery boasts a rich and varied programme to rival many a bigger institution. From Anj Smith’s paintings of the Anthropocene to Cerith Wyn Evans’ sculpture, and the multi-disciplinary Noémie Goudal, their dedication to a model based on bringing great international contemporary art to North Wales has paid off. Their latest exhibitions – Chinese abstract artist Ding Yi, alongside the sculptural forms, textiles and works on paper of Brazil’s Vanessa da Silva – continue to successfully tap that vein.
Wednesday – To Die For 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50
Coming before the onset of social media influencers and their like, Gus Van Sant’s To Die For is a wickedly funny and astute study in cold-blooded pre-internet ambition. In it, we find Nicole Kidman’s smalltown Suzanne Stone, striving for status measured in viewing figures. Her dream? To become a news anchor – whatever the cost. As a satire of the mid-90s, it foreshadows the rot ushered in by the then still-nascent internet.
Thursday – Exhibition Opening: Christopher Kulendran Thomas + Bahar Noorizadeh 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – FREE
In 2019′s Ground Zero, Christopher Kulendran Thomas collaborated with Annika Kuhlmann to weave together fiction, documentary and history to address identity, the art market and the nature of power through the lens of his Sri Lankan-Tamil heritage. The pair team up once again for new body of work, Safe Zone (top), to unpick the political, economic and cultural factors that bleed into the quotidian. Complementing Safe Zone, Free To Choose (below) is Bahar Noorizadeh’s immersive film work reflecting the artist, writer and filmmaker’s ongoing examination of the relationship between art and capitalism.
Catch the pair in conversation ahead of the opening tonight at five, in a one-off in-person event. While tomorrow (Friday) sees Invisible Wind Factory host a free multi-sensory performance expanding on Noorizadeh’s themes, in Admiror, Or Revolutionary Sentiments.
Friday – Hayao Miyazaki’s Dreams 7pm @ the Tung Auditorium, Liverpool – £20-£35
Few of us remain immune from the charms and beauty found in the worlds spilling forth from the imagination of Studio Ghibli co-founder and director Hayao Miyazaki. Humane and fantastical, while steadfastly deeply personal, his rich and varied filmography is celebrated this evening by Mystery Ensemble, who pay tribute to regular Ghibli composer, Joe Hisaishi, and others across scores for films including My Neighbour Totoro (above), Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away and more.
Saturday – Bram Stoker’s Dracula 8.20pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8.50
Seventy years after F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Francis Ford Coppola turned his not inconsiderable talents to vampire mythology. His take on Dracula is sweeping and more coherent than many other attempts: we learn about Vlad’s motivations – played with relish by Gary Oldman – his loss and his loves. Some of the cinematography, especially with its nods to vampire cinema history, is notable. While failing to please Stoker purists for its romantic leanings, arguably the bigger crime was Keanu Reeves’ performance as Jonathan Harker which, says Christopher Frayling, “should have won the Dick Van Dyke Award” for worst English accent.
Further Reading: Vampire Cinema: The First One Hundred Years
Sunday – Rough Trade Book Club Social @ Rough Trade Liverpool – FREE
I recently caught the pronouncement that BookTok is making reading cool again. I mean, ok, because reading and books needed to be rescued from the doldrums. As we know, reading and books will and have never not been cool. All of which is to say, this Sunday sees Rough Trade’s Book Club Social meet to discuss Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. And if that doesn’t suit your taste, why not get some like-minded friends together to start your own?
Last Chance to See: Farah Al Qasimi: Everybody was Invited to a Party @ the Bluecoat – FREE
Farah Al Qasimi’s Everybody was Invited to a Party (above), takes as its departure point Iftah Ya Simsim; translating as Open Sesame, it was the first international co-production of Sesame Street in the Arab world. Featuring hand-sewn puppets, in Al Qasimi’s hands, it tenderly interrogates breakdowns in language and meaning, gently presenting the melancholy and humour that ensues.
Mike Pinnington
Images/media, from top: Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Safe Zone. In collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann. WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art Brussels, 2024. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Andrea Rossetti; To Die For (trailer); Free To Choose, Bahar Noorizadeh, screen shot; My Neighbour Totoro; Farah Al Qasimi, Everybody was Invited to a Party screen shot
