The Weekender
Illness meant that we missed the window to publish our usual pick of the week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond, but its fashionably late sibling, The Weekender, makes up for it…
Friday – Last Chance to See: Liverpool School of Art & Design Degree Show (until 6 June) @ John Lennon Art and Design Building, Liverpool – FREE
2025 marks 200 years of Liverpool School of Art & Design, fittingly celebrated by this year’s degree shows. A good heads up for names we may see producing great, challenging work – now and in the near future – it is, rightly, a fixture in ours and the city’s cultural calendar.
Exhibition Continues: What The Mountain Has Seen @ LJMU Exhibition Research Lab, John Lennon Art and Design Building, Liverpool – FREE
Off the beaten track of the usual exhibition spaces in the city, LJMU’s ERL shouldn’t be overlooked. Current exhibition, What The Mountain Has Seen, a case in point. Curated by Dr Christine Eyene, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the university and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool, this focused group exhibition responds to the memory of the land, botanical histories, and Liverpool’s colonial legacies. With film, installation, collage and cyanotypes from artists Shiraz Bayjoo, Joy Gregory, Yvon Ngassam, Jean David Nkot, Boris Nzebo, and Freya Tewelde.
Friday – Independents Biennial Launch Party 6pm @ Port Sunlight Village, Wirral – FREE
An evening of grassroots celebrations in Port Sunlight Village marks the arrival of this year’s Independents Biennial. Expect music, performance, food and drink in the beautiful, historic setting of the workers’ village.
Liverpool Biennial Opening Party 7pm @ Sub Rosa, 3 Kings Dock St, Liverpool – FREE
Liverpool Biennial opening parties? We’ve been to our fair share. A rare opportunity for the great and good of the city’s art world to shake off the shackles of the occasionally po-faced strictures of the sector; taking place this year in new Baltic Triangle venue, Sub Rosa.
Saturday – Opening: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE
The wait is over as the 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial dawns in venues 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.
Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK Preview
Opening: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE
Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the just-as-well established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as it ever has done. 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.
Final Weekend (runs until 10 June, by appointment): Fractured Familiar @ 50MV, Crosby, Liverpool – FREE
Featuring paintings and sculpture by Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, Jeffrey Knopf, Jamie Kirk and Luke Skiffington, Fractured Familiar includes: 1970s cgi, medical models, signage, photography and 3D scans. Introducing glitches and uncertainty into otherwise typical territory, ‘truth and fiction,’ goes the exhibition blurb, ‘become blurred, forgotten and then reimagined’.
Sunday – Rear Window 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool
Perhaps our favourite of all Hitchcock’s films. From Jimmy Stewart’s cooped up, inquisitive (some may say snooping and obsessive) photo-journalist, and Grace Kelly’s incredulous girlfriend, to the incredible set design and THAT breaking in scene, Rear Window is a classic of the suspense thriller genre.
Mike Pinnington
Images, from top: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK ident; What The Mountain Has Seen installation photography, Mike Pinnington; Independents Biennial, The Old Fire Station; Fractured Familiar ident
