Culture Diary w/c 07-07-2025
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…
Monday – Mars Express 5.40pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.84
Ostensibly the tale of a notorious hacker and a missing person on 23rd century Mars, with a plot exploring, among other things, brain farms, Jérémie Périn’s sci-fi noir is frequently described as France’s answer to Ghost in the Shell.
Continuing: Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK – FREE
The 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial continues 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. Check individual venues for opening days/times.
Further Reading: My Life in the Biennial with Ghosts; Liverpool Biennial: BEDROCK Review
Continuing: Independents Biennial 2025 – FREE
Running in parallel to BEDROCK is the well-established Independents Biennial which, this year, feels as ambitious as ever. 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. Check individual venues for opening days/times.
Guitar Wolf 7.30pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead – £19.60
Elemental rock ‘n’ roll from Japanese icons of the genre. See: Fujiyama Attack!
Tuesday – Hearts of Darkness 5.40 (and Wednesday at 4.45) @ FACT Liverpool– £9.35
Documentary, Hearts of Darkness, chronicles director Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now on- and off-set travails.
Wednesday – Artist Tour: Amartey Golding 6pm @ FACT Liverpool – FREE
Amartey Golding’s work addresses masculinity, nationhood, vulnerability and violence; themes, he has, for the last two years, explored with men at Fazakerley’s HMP Altcourse. Together, they created Silent Knight, a suit of armour that is the latest piece in the artist’s Chainmail series. Both reflection on the tools men use to navigate life and, created over hundreds of hours, time spent that can never be reclaimed, join Golding today for a guided tour.
Pavements 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £14.85
So-called as it presents the Pavement we think we know alongside one played by a cast of actors (including Stranger Things’ Joe Keery), director Alex Ross Perry’s film, Pavements, has its cake and eats it in this meta, atypical look at the band of their generation.
Thursday – Liverpool Biennial 2025: Drop-in Weekly Tea and Talk Tours 2pm @ 20 Jordan Street – FREE
This does what it says on the tin tour offers a way to ease yourself in to the Biennial if all those sites, artists and the theme itself prove a bit overwhelming – it can be a lot to take in. If our experience of this edition’s Biennial volunteers is anything to go by, you’ll be in safe, informative, hands.
Exhibition Opening: Drawing (Paper) Show 2025 5.30pm @ The Bridewell Studios & Gallery – FREE
Drawing – so often erroneously seen as the preliminary step before getting down to making the ‘real’ art – is, quite rightly, celebrated in and of itself here. Featuring more than 50 artists from around the world, this latest iteration of the Drawing (Paper) Show – as it frequently has in the past – will no doubt challenge our expectations of the medium. As previously, artists in the exhibition (including familiar names Caroline Gorick, Penny Davenport and Tomo) will also appear in Drawing Paper, marking the publication’s 10th edition. See you there.
Friday – Opening: LAAF @ Various Venues – £Various
The crucial and always brilliantly programmed Liverpool Arab Arts Fest returns this week, running until 20 July. Including performance, art, music, community events, literature and workshops, this year’s iteration of the UK’s longest-running annual Arab arts and culture festival addresses the thorny topic of nostalgia.
Funny Games 8.45pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35
Michael Haneke’s 1997 home invasion horror to rule them all, this genuinely unsettling look at what happens when social mores are out of whack with expectations more than retains the power to shock.
Saturday – Limbs of the Lunar Disc: Break the Clocks 1pm @ World Museum, Liverpool – FREE
Performance lecture from LAAF artist, Sarah al Sarraj, whose new, time-collapsing work, Limbs of the Lunar Disc: Isthmus Ancient River, can be seen at the museum until 20 July.
Sunday – Videodrome 2.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35
A sexy sci-fi cult classic from David Cronenberg (The Fly, History of Violence, Naked Lunch), prepare to be grossed out as sleazy TV exec Max Renn (played with glee by James Woods) commissions a new type of programme: Videodrome. As the violence, torture and hallucinations get more and more extreme, the signal’s source is finally revealed…
Mike Pinnington
Images/media, from top: Mars Express trailer; Amber Akaunu, Still from ‘Dear Othermother’, 2024. Courtesy of the Artist; Guitar Wolf/Fujiyama Attack; Amartey Golding, Chainmail 4: Silent Knight (2025). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Photography by Rob Battersby; Drawing (Paper) Show (drawing by M. Lohrum; Funny Games trailer
