NEW // Culture Diary w/c 21-09-2026
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…
Monday – Exhibition Continues: Wide Angle View @ Tate Liverpool + RIBA North – FREE
This excellent exhibition of The Architectural Review’s Manplan series – which looked at architecture’s social responsibilities – makes a mockery of RIBA North’s relatively limited floorspace, fitting tightly-curated sections of excellent photography within its confines. Published at the end of the ‘60s, Manplan strove to tackle questions of what a city might be, challenging the culture of the time across issues including Frustration, Local Government and Housing. Today, when cities often seem only to exist to relieve us of what little money we may have, the exhibition reminds us of other ideals, posing questions about social responsibility to citizens.
FILM: Tokyo Story 7.20pm @ FACT Liverpool – £5.99
Coming in at an impressive fourth in Sight & Sound’s latest Greatest Films of All Time list, Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) is closing in on its 75th anniversary; the celebrated director’s subject matter here is that of an aging couple faced with the painful realisation of their adult children’s seeming indifference. Described by Jane Campion as “delicate, beautiful, and full of a complicated wise love,” following Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951), it completes a loose trilogy of Ozu’s films dealing with the inevitable passage of time (pictured, below).
Tuesday – Exhibitions Continue: Close to Home @ the Cunard Building; New Faces, New Focus: Stories We Share & Next Up! @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE
Close to Home, from Heart of Glass in St Helens, brings together eight years-worth of artist Mark Storor’s work made in collaboration with people with lived and living experience of suicide. Including film, photography, sculpture, poetry and music, the Liverpool city centre exhibition – part of a hugely ambitious long-term project – offers a space for contemplation, reflection and is an attempt to give voice to those affected by suicide. Given the subject matter, Close to Home engages with themes that some people may find emotionally challenging. Open Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday @ the Cunard Building, Liverpool.
At nearby Open Eye gallery, meanwhile, you’ll find two jam-packed exhibitions. In New Focus: Stories We Share, and Next Up!, a collaborative endeavour developed in the Liverpool City Region, Armagh and Aberdeenshire, foregrounds communities whose stories – dealing with themes of journeys, identity and home – are rarely represented in museum collections. Graduate showcase Next Up! includes work from the MA in Socially Engaged Photography, collaboratively run by Open Eye with the University of Salford. This year’s bright young things include early-career photographers, Yaqeen Amir, Ella Horniman, Jack Smith, and Helen Constantinou, whose works variously address personal memory; creative opportunity in underrepresented communities; the environment; and material and processes.
Wednesday – Exhibitions Continue: Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 and Seema Mattu; BRB @ FACT Liverpool – FREE
Opening last week, these fresh out of the box exhibitions tackle a multitude of concerns. Singaporean artist Rae-Yen Song’s landscape-traversing show looks at our connections to ecosystems (including insects from FACT’s rooftop garden), ancestors, and the cosmos, drawing on the immigrant experience to reimagine the world. Seema Mattu’s tour bus as installation encompasses music, sculpture, film and digital animation, with a focus on sonic joy, musicality and collectivity via tour Saheli – a group comprised of five South Asian queer women: Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay, MANI JNX, Ushara Dilrukshan, Zahrah Hutton and Mattu. Upstairs in BRB, Liverpool-based artists Livi Wilmore, Mrs Luva-Luva and Ellie Hoskins explore a mixture of the (very funny) mundane, abject and the increasingly blurry separation between on- and offline realms.
FILM: Her 7.30pm @ FACT Liverpool – £9.35
Spike Jonze’s 2013 film about a man falling in love with his newly acquired, highly sophisticated, AI operating system, makes for some interesting parallels with our own fraught moment. Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a writer working for BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, initially leans into Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) for everything from help composing his niche missives as an analogue letter writer, to life advice, before somewhat more develops between the two. At a time when we’re grappling with AI and all we imagine that entails – from skills loss to relationships, and dire warnings about threats to humanity – Jonze’s perspective amounts to a positively cozy one.
Thursday – FILM: The Anfield People’s Cinema Festival – FREE (donation optional)
Those paying attention will have noticed that, of late, a burgeoning and diverse number of indie/alternative film clubs has emerged across Liverpool. Among them, The Anfield People’s Cinema, which today launches its first film festival at venues across the area, including the local bowling club, parish and Kitty’s Launderette – a cultural hub known for hosting regular art and writing workshops, live music and theatre. In a something-for-everyone line-up, screenings include: Letter to Brezhnev, Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, and Back to the Future. With each also accompanied by a free meal sourced from local businesses, this is a superb, cheap and democratic addition to a blossoming North Liverpool culture diary.
Friday – Exhibition Opening: Becky Beasley: ‘A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029)’ @ the Bluecoat – FREE
In this touring exhibition, described in its interpretation as “a meticulously constructed interior pastoral landscape,” Becky Beasley presents an immersive environment in four parts. Across work, family, chosen family and dying, Beasley proposes a trip through life’s milestones, taking in linoleum covered floor, a series of silhouette lakes, custom-made benches, ceramic and audio works, and a film narrated by Being Human actor Russell Tovey.
Out of Town: Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival, Barnsley – FREE (booking encouraged)
The 10th edition of this brilliant nomadic festival of the “radical arts organisation situated in the North of England,” rocks up in Barnsley. Tracing the town’s Luddite heritage while considering its digital future, AND 2026 looks at the town’s infrastructure as a “lived, material and cultural condition.” Featuring international and UK artists working at the intersection of art and tech, expect a smorgasbord of very experimental, genre-bending, free installations, performances, films and talks; including an audiovisal poem, Chaos Theory, from Amsterdam-based artist collective Metahaven (pictured, above).
Saturday – FILM: My Stolen Planet 5pm @ Unity Theatre, Liverpool – £10/£7
Directed by Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi, My Stolen Planet is a study of inner and external worlds – freedom and oppression, the personal and political. Born amid the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and exiled since 2022, using Super 8 home movies and found home movies of others, Sharifi traces and presents hazy memories that, in the current context, have become radical, incendiary artefacts. Given the recent experience of Iranian actor Laleh Marzban following her comments at the Venice Film Festival, this takes on an even more timely, essential feel.
Sunday – Closing Soon: The Hardmans’ Liverpool A Legacy in Light: From Street to Studio @ Liverpool Central Library (until 28 September) – FREE
Rodney Street’s Hardman House reveals a world of the studio photographer of yesteryear – the work for which Edward Chambré and Margaret Hardman were best known. But this (somewhat hidden) exhibition in Liverpool Central Library sheds new light on the couple’s portfolio. Capturing a swiftly changing city in the decades before and after the Second World War, The Hardmans’ Liverpool – with its scenes of blitz damaged dockland, defunct overhead railway and the rhythms of everyday life – is social and cultural record both. Catch it while you can.
Mike Pinnington
Images, from top:
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊, •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• (2026). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Rob Battersby.
Tokyo Story (1953), dir. Yasujirō Ozu (still).
Poster for The Anfield People’s Cinema Festival 2026.
Chaos Theory (2021) by Metahaven is presented as part of AND Festival 2026 with support from Barnsley Council and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The work is held in the permanent collection of Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa.
My Stolen Planet (2024), dir. Farahnaz Sharifi (still).
