We know that they are melting, never to return. We know that they are so intrinsic to Icelandic culture that there is grief around their loss; a funeral was held for Okjokull, Iceland’s first glacier to disappear, and which once covered six square miles of deep ice.  

“Exploring the work of ChihChung Chang is to better understand the slippage between stories we think we know and those as experienced by living, breathing places – and the communities calling them home.” Mike Pinnington digs into the artist and cultural researcher’s multi-site contribution to Liverpool Biennial 2025…

On the site of a former Chinese boarding house in Liverpool’s Great George Square there is a blue plaque commemorating the contribution to the city’s history by Chinese seafarers forcibly deported from the city in 1946. A shameful, underexposed chapter in the UK’s post-Second World War history, the policy separated thousands of seafarers from their families. That its unveiling, coming in July 2024, is so recent speaks to the complex, disproportionate relationship between Britain, this city, and the oldest Chinese community in Europe.

As if to reflect this complexity, there are many strands to Taiwanese artist and cultural researcher ChihChung Chang’s multi-site Liverpool Biennial contribution. To engage with the fruits of Chang’s research is not unlike prying off the thin though stubborn façade of place to get to the real, human stories beneath; at other times, it is more akin to setting forth on a voyage of discovery. Exploring the work of this cultural cartographer is to better understand the slippage between stories we think we know and those as experienced by living, breathing places – and the communities calling them home.

Across a satisfying multi-disciplinary installation at city centre venue, Bluecoat, an outside companion piece situated in Liverpool’s China Town, and a film in the nearby Pine Court Housing Association, the works speak to interwoven threads, allusions and tensions to unpick, consider and address. They each tell a part of the story in and of themselves, but – as with much of this Biennial – it is best to think of them as constituent parts. To experience each complementary aspect as parts of a whole is to see Chang’s research coalesce into a bigger picture.

At Bluecoat, you’ll find narratives of social history that reference family, community, biography, industrial decline, and cultural regeneration via post-modernity. In a Taiwan-set film of cultural histories told in three chapters, various objects relating to shipping (with a model vessel playing the role of anchor work) and a Chinese Arch come together to form Port of Fata Morgana. It situates art as both tribute – to home and family – and a self-portrait of sorts. This is the stuff of the artist’s life – the place, upbringing and people that have influenced him, one way or another, and inspired the research that lead him here.

Pushing beyond those initial, substantial layers, Port of Fata Morgana (named for the mutable, inconsistent nature of once bustling port cities) instigates a process of identifying and interrogating the commonalities and differences shared by communities separated by language, history and thousands of miles (6,199 if we’re counting). Here, Chang bridges historical, cultural and geographic gaps, by putting his home of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan in conversation with Liverpool, his artworks’ temporary home.

A multitude of resonances have surfaced in the process. Both Kaohsiung and Liverpool are declining port cities, whose busiest, most profitable shipping days are behind them; they have each been rejuvenated of late, through necessity, by a belief in and commitment to culture as a driving force. These resonances initiate a departure point from which we can dig deeper, and consider the impact on people and places when surroundings and their meaning shifts – planned or otherwise – and vice versa. What does it mean for a place to become a microcosm for a changing world?

A work which gets to the heart of how the warp and weft of place and communities – especially ports – might be felt, is Keystone (2025), a collaboratively made paper mural found in Liverpool’s China Town (on Grenville Street South). Depicting a Chinese Arch, its title responds directly to the BEDROCK theme of Liverpool Biennial; an architectural keystone is structurally crucial. But it might also speak to and acknowledge the strength and diversity within the community it reflects, and the components that make powerful meaning within it.

With facilitation from Liverpool’s Pagoda Arts, whose mission it is ‘to introduce Chinese Culture to a wide and diverse community’, Keystone – artwork as connective tissue – is the manifestation of workshops in which residents were invited to share their stories of and relationships to Liverpool. Sparking these stories, participants were asked to bring along a meaningful object that they felt was important to them and their place in the city, from which they made rubbings in charcoal.

In an accompanying film of these workshops showing at Pine Court, it is clear that its contributors represent a spectrum of ages and backgrounds. Keystone, then, is both representation and in recognition of different generations of people who have helped develop this particular ongoing volume of the story of a city. In it, you can see images of items, text and people’s signatures, along with the artist’s own rubbings. You can pick out Mersey Docks signage; a plaque commemorating David Lewis, department store founder; and Liver Birds standing in for the traditional Chinese dragon – a creature representing power, prosperity and good luck. Taken from across the city, these rubbings link China Town’s communities and heritage to Liverpool at large, as opposed to the limitations of a specific setting.

A cross-section of the culture and society of which they are all part, this isn’t a picture or representation of any one unified story. Nor, I don’t think, is it meant to be. Instead it establishes a place for the many interweaving lives and narratives from the diaspora to be told. Memories, emotions, dreams of the city – these are literal imprints of the community embedded in Liverpool’s urban and psychological landscape.

Rendered in simple monochrome it may be, but Keystone is nothing less than a visualisation of the belonging and adding to that takes place therein, one layer of sediment atop another. It is a living rather than fixed monument, in a way that even the grandeur of the 44ft Imperial Arch that marks the gateway to China Town – a gift from Shanghai to celebrate the twinning of  the cities 25 years ago – can’t be.          

Mike Pinnington

Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK continues until 14 September at various venues across the city

Images, from top: ChihChung Chang, ‘Keystone’, 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025. Photography by Rob Battersby; ChihChung Chang 張致中, ‘Port of Fata Morgana’, 2024. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Bluecoat. Photography by Mark McNulty; ChihChung Chang, ‘Keystone’, 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025. Photography by Rob Battersby 

On the eve of a new Liverpool exhibition, showcasing the notebooks and collages of 2025 TLS Ackerley Prize-winning author Jeff Young, Mike Pinnington considers memory, nostalgia, and the writer’s creative process… 

In Yoko Ogawa’s allegorical The Memory Police, things – birds, calendars, maps – are arbitrarily ‘disappeared’ from the collective memory, fascistically stripped of meaning; in Apple TV’s Silo, objects from a ‘before time’ (including a Pez dispenser) are designated as relics, and forbidden; Georgi Gospodinov’s satire, Time Shelter, revolves around ‘clinics for the past’ as a method of treatment for those with Alzheimer’s. These prove so successful as to precipitate a ‘referendum of the past’ in which European countries opt to vote for a bygone decade they want to recreate and live in.

Truth often proves to be stranger than fiction: after Franco’s death in Spain in 1975, a Pact of Forgetting was proposed as a means of moving beyond the painful legacies of the Civil War. But memory is a powerful thing. Both sacred and profane, the past – like it or not – tears through the years and decades. Inevitably it catches up with us, and remains present. It shapes our world view, the way we think and, to some extent, act.

Frequently, objects – as both Ogawa and Gospodinov demonstrate – are the locus of remembrance, voluntary or otherwise. Like the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, some things (they needn’t be cakes!), are imbued with evocative, mysterious properties, and can flood us with memories and feelings long forgotten, or thought buried. They suggest, provoke, exhume and resuscitate; conjuring time, place and feelings, they are infused with a kind of magic.

The writing of author and playwright Jeff Young has been known to have much the same effect. The worlds he invokes feel so close as to brush up against us. Ghost Town – his alt. city symphony shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography award – builds a picture of Liverpool as “a living thing”, as he calls it, so successfully that you feel you could open the book and step onto the city’s streets, walk in his footsteps; maybe even grab a coffee with him. Certain of its passages prick your eyes and make the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. “I had the feeling – still have the feeling – that the city was a living novel and we were walking through its pages.”

His most recent act of writing time and place into fresh existence is 2024′s Wild Twin, for which Young has just been awarded the 2025 TLS Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography ‘of outstanding merit’. Here, as it inextricably must be, memory is closely entwined with nostalgia:

“I began to dream of places I had been to and could no longer go. And so I went to where I always go, into the shadowplay of memory where I might find an echo, a reflection, the wild twin that always runs on ahead over the edge, into the beyond.”

As we know, there is peril in nostalgia. It is tempting, seductive. It is a kind of warping as much as it is a yearning. What do we want? Who do we want? A younger, more vital and fearless version of ourselves? Had that person ever really existed? Are we remembering right? Sometimes, we can haunt ourselves. For Young, though, it seems nostalgia isn’t something to be wary of. This isn’t a place to wallow and hide, shutting out the world, denying the present and hope of a future like a latter day Miss Haversham, or a reclusive, gone-to-seed rock star well past their prime. It is neither a cul-de-sac, nor simple aide-memoire; it is a creative provocation.

From it, Young excavates friends and lovers, old haunts, music shops, films, paperbacks, architecture, family gatherings, misadventures – the stuff of life that we all must accumulate to become ourselves – to produce something vibrant and alive in the here and now. Most obviously, this comes in the form of his lyrical, richly textured writing, which arrives with such warmth, and so fully realised, as to put us in the city, bar or living room he has reached back through time to vividly recall and present afresh.

The kindling for these works is provided in no small part by notebooks kept by Young, but also by companion collage and assemblage. Collectively, he describes these three-dimensional artefacts as ‘imagination batteries’, helping to invigorate, and provide the impetus and drive for the writing process. ”I see them as magic spells,” he has said. “An archive of fleeting moments captured before they fade away. They summon up ghosts, language, images, memories, ideas, incantations, hexes, ritual alchemy.” What he might not say, however, is that these are works of art in their own right, that beautifully complement the books they helped inspire him to write.

Two such collages adorn the pages of Wild Twin, a book dedicated to his dad, Cyril, who had died in 2023. Unvarnished, Young writes on this in the book’s final chapter. He writes also about these works that amount, in some ways, to family portraits; absences very much present in the “vessels [that] would act as time machines, as portals to the past” built while his dad slept.

As rich with meaning and suggestion as his writing, these accumulations plucked from life’s flotsam and jetsam, include: “Thimbles, foreign coins, medals, brooches, holiday snaps, acorns, pebbles, seashells, door keys, lucky charms, earrings, lace handkerchiefs, spoons, poems, cigarette and tea cards, the broken heads of dolls, marbles, cufflinks, dried flowers, corks, buttons, chess pieces, teeth.”

Channelling, he says, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, “In tobacco tins and cigar tins I curated memories.” And, he explains: “I thought of memory as being in the present moment, rather than in the mists of whatever ‘The Past’ is. I imagined my tiny museums and tobacco tin machines were living engines of today and tomorrow as much as they were reminders of the past.”

Maybe this is the best way to think about memory – and its own wild twin, nostalgia – as much the driver of the present- and future-tense as it is a place to wistfully visit on occasion, lest we get pulled down by the undertow.

Mike Pinnington

Dorothy X Jeff Young: Haunted Paper previews 6 August, from 5pm @ Dorothy, Jamaica Street, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool

Read Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay – A Conversation with Jeff Young

Images, from top: Film still, courtesy Matt Bell; Ghost Town; Wild Twin Collage, by Jeff Young; film stills, courtesy Matt Bell

“Drawing deserves our consideration and attention. It always did.” Mike Pinnington on the ongoing elevation of a medium… 

Drawing. It’s something we all do, until we don’t. When asked, all too early, to put aside so-called childish things – fairy tales, toys, play in general – art, and often drawing specifically, goes with them. It is the sensible few that continue beyond the age such things are thought reasonable. As we get older, of course, a few realise that, in jettisoning such things, something important was lost, and so trickle back to pencil and paper for the pure enjoyment of it. Or, as we might put it today, mindfulness.

Perhaps this universality of experience – drawing as something we all share in childhood – and the idea of it as a hobby, is why it has been so long thought of as ‘less than’ painting, sculpture, and other mediums. That, and the fact it is also seen, even or especially within the art sector, as preliminary, preparatory – merely a step along the way to what might become the ‘actual’ finished artwork. Even when drawing, in one form or another, is the intended end point, it has to be given a specific collective artsy term to elevate the results; so, we call them works on paper.

But, recent years have seen drawing promoted, its status raised from a secondary, supporting role, to that of primary medium in and of itself. This is due, perhaps, to a number of circumstances: people picking up pencil and sketchbook (either for the first time, or first time in years) during the lockdowns; or it being a symptom of the post-internet age, a reconnection with more tactile, analogue methods – and a growing malaise, even unease with, digital platforms. As noted by Ed Krčma, “art historian Michael Newman suggests [that] the meaning of drawing’s specific qualities is conditioned by the field of other visual technologies with which it shares a space at any one time.”

For all of these reasons and less quantifiable ones, it can be said that drawing, one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, is having a prolonged moment. This has been evidenced by a marked upturn in discussion of the medium, manifested by major publications and exhibitions dedicated to its immediacy, versatility, and the sheer freedom of expression it allows. One such notable champion, called Drawing Paper, emerged in Liverpool in 2010. Created by artists Mike Carney and Jon Barraclough, it has proved a much-loved space for drawing in all its forms, and has sprouted an occasional exhibiting element, The Drawing (Paper) Show.

Barraclough remains involved. Joined by Colette Lilley and Sarah Jane Richards, this year has seen the Drawing Paper publish its 10th edition (alongside a parallel exhibition as part of the Independents Biennial). Selected and curated by Barraclough, Lilley, Richards, and guest Curtis Holder, its pages represent an impressively wide and sometimes surprising variety of work by more than 50 artists. It makes for an eloquent demonstration of the medium’s flexibility, and the possibility for innovation it – perhaps uniquely – offers.

From the resolutely traditional to what we might call expanded understandings of drawing – and everything in between – it provides an international insight into its state and status today. Simultaneously, it challenges the viewer to question what can be categorised as drawing.

Reassuringly, traditional landscape and portraiture figure. Yuxuan Hou’s Keston Ponds (2024) richly renders the lakes of Keston Common in graphite on paper. The haunting ruin of a territory depicted in Chris Shaw Hughes’ Gaza – Welcome Home (2025), speaks for itself, and demonstrates drawing’s aptitude for widescreen, coruscating reportage. Emotionally charged portraits by Kaye Hodges (The Rejection Letter, 2025) and Cristina Celestini (Metamorphosis (dreaming after Veronese) 2025), capture their sitters so that we might assume they had been made in another era altogether (even as the mood of the latter’s subject subtly transitions in echoes across the picture plane).

If Belinda Yee’s striking Graphic Profile (fold 1, 2023), looks as though it harks back to the peak Op-Art of Bridget Riley, it is in fact a kind of portrait itself, made, says the artist, “by tracing rock faces around Sydney Harbour and using those profile lines as templates.” A meditation on deep time and the body – Yee uses her own breaths to guide her mark-making – it takes us way beyond the dimensions of the folded paper on which it is presented.

Now firmly in expanded drawing territory, Kelly Cumberland takes us further still, with Helix Silicium v0.1 (2025). Made with etched silicone rubber and looking like a warped ship’s propellor, suspended from the ceiling in a gallery setting, it introduces a third dimension to proceedings, pushing drawing firmly into kinetic sculpture territory.

If such works ask whether or not we can think of them as ‘drawings’ at all, the inclusion of Caroline Gorick’s Evening Light (2024), made using oil paint, may prove a bridge too far for some. In a recent review of Gorick’s exhibition, After Hours, which featured this very work, I never once used the term drawing. Time and again, I referred to this and other works in the show as paintings. And, yet, here it is. This brilliant small-scale work – be it drawing, painting, or both(?) – adds a frisson of controversy to Drawing Paper 10. A talking point among many others.

But let us not get too hung up on such things – we’re in the realms of contemporary art after all. We’re meant to disagree occasionally. What I think we can agree on, however, as demonstrated by the artists mentioned here, and many others besides, is that drawing deserves our consideration and attention. It always did.

Mike Pinnington

A full list of Drawing Paper 2025 artists can be found here; Drawing (Paper) Show 2025 was on display at Bridewell Studios & Gallery 11 July – 31 July, 2025

Images, from top: Gaza – Welcome Home (2025), Chris Shaw Hughes; Drawing Paper #1; The Rejection Letter (2025), Kaye Hodges; Graphic Profile (fold 1, 2023), Belinda Yee; Evening Light (2024), Caroline Gorick. All works courtesy the artists and Drawing(Paper)Show 25 

Continuing a run of superb exhibitions, Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno hosts Jeremy Deller’s ode to Welsh culture. Laura Robertson finds echoes of and reverie in many versions of the past, a playful and critical tribute to art and selfhood…

Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? ‘Carreg Ateb’, translated from the Welsh for answering stone, or echo stone; a rock to cause a call to action, or a reverie, as the phase suggests? An echo, a solution, or a firm resolution? The original Carreg Ateb is a capstone from a prehistoric burial chamber, situated on the Pembrokeshire coast, which the local Abbott would strike in order to bless fishing boats going out to sea, and to protect those souls going out to dangerous work, wild weather, and for the unknowable catch.

The title of Jeremy Deller’s new exhibition at Mostyn Gallery in North Wales throws up a barrage of thoughts before you even cross the threshold. The exhibition title is immortalised in a patchwork banner by Deller’s long-term collaborator, Ed Hall, who’s been making trade union campaign and exhibition banners with the artist for 25 years. The political tone of Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? points, in a fittingly dreamlike way, to Welsh culture today and yesterday, and the repair of culture after a slow, insidious oppression by English power or powers.

The show is a gentle drip-drip of these ideas. As usual, Mostyn Gallerys’s natural light and vaulted ceilings make for a space that allows art to breathe, crucial in allowing visitors to observe craft pieces, heirlooms, artefacts, and new work by young Welsh artists that poke and prod at what the artistic self might mean, given the tools, materials and subject matter specific to nation.

Here are many objects that rouse curiosity and awe: including Astronomical Slates (1837) carved by brothers Thomas and William Jones, of Bryn Twrw, Tregarth, quarrymen and farmers: the cosmos and its meanings depicted with tremendous care on a material prone to shatter. A decorated horse jaw, originally and accidently unearthed by Thomas Kendrick as he was digging in his garden on the Great Orme cliffs (1880); Kendrick’s cave, as it came to be known, contained the jaw as well as flint, bear teeth, and human bones, believed to be from the Upper Paleolithic era. The famous Wrexham Tailor’s Quilt by James Williams (1842-1852): 4,525 pieces of felted woollens and military uniforms, meticulously sewn offcuts depicting an array of Biblical stories, including Adam with exotic animals in the Garden of Eden, and Jonah and the Whale.

Here, also, are very recent stories: a film installation with poster, Llwyfan Beca (2025) by Esyllt Angharad Lewis, or Beca’s Stage, portraying a young girl in cockle bonnet and dress, performing the past, alongside other schoolchildren. The poster reads ‘Cyfiiawnder a charwyr cyfiawnder ydym ni oll’, meaning, Justice and the lovers (holders) of justice we all are; alluding to the Justice and the Lovers tarot cards, a combination that indicates clarity, honesty and self-discovery. Lewis Prosser’s buff willow baskets, mace, urns and collars (2025) are another unexpected way of channelling historic procession; civic regalia for today made with a skill he taught himself in Lockdown. At first glance, they could be on loan from local museums and collections.

Later, Prosser’s wicker costumes, and those by artist and filmmaker Edith Morris, are worn by local children from the Frân Wen theatre company in a carnival-esque march along the promenade and through the streets – little legs dance underneath uncanny giant basket heads, and little heads shake fringed animal masks, to the beat of a brass band playing Daft Punk.

In opposition, there are items on display that rouse and shame: a Welsh Not wooden board, a tool of punishment and humiliation, hung around schoolchildren’s necks if caught speaking Welsh; old school books of British history rooted in Crown and Empire, where the Welsh ‘people belong to a different race from the English’; Ian Campbell’s appliqué banner, asking ‘A OES HEDDWCH?’, Is there peace?

Strangeness and joy connect performance to exhibit. Deller’s Folk Archives show raves in the mines, the ribboned horse-head of Mari Lwyd riding in a taxi, and, again unexpectedly, his collection of fan art about Caerphilly’s best rock band, Manic Street Preachers. Relationships emerge with broader legends, as in Manod quarry, which housed the nation’s art during WW2 on Churchill’s insistence, and whose archives were inspiration for this show; in Welsh mythology, The Mabinogion, and in the in-between realms; to Bryn Celli Ddu Burial Chamber on the Welsh island of Anglesey, which we visited the next day to see Frân Wen continue their revelry for the summer solstice. In the driving rain, children bounce up and down the burial mound, singing, arms reaching to the sky, welcoming the return of light to the land.

It is a complex and hypnotic version of the Carreg Ateb, or answering stone, that is presented, if you are open to receive it. Truth is underlined by folklore. The show builds layers of meaning until the tensions of old and new, of pretence and play, reach a climax; echoes of a sort, of mismatched expectations, of what the Welsh culture actually is in the minds of the Welsh, as opposed to the English, who have historically corralled them into the social and cultural categories of ‘other’.

Laura Robertson

See the exhibition Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? at Mostyn, Llandudno, until 27 September 2025 – free entry

Presented by Mostyn and Frân Wen’s Young Company as part of a celebration commission curated by Jeremy Deller to celebrate The National Gallery’s bicentenary. With Storiel Bangor, Llandudno Museum, the CARN network, and Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment service

See live performances, The Triumph of Art: A free party in Trafalgar Square, 11am-4pm, Saturday 26 July in London’s Trafalgar Square

Image credits: installation shots by Rob Battersby; live performance shots by Mark McNulty. 2025. With thanks

The latest Liverpool Arab Arts Festival arrives this Friday. Here, Mike Pinnington takes a trip through some of 2025′s not-to-be-missed highlights…

Just like that, we’re well into July, and Liverpool’s cultural calendar continues to unfold correspondingly, with Friday’s launch of LAAF 2025. Across performance, art, music, community, 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.

Should you have dipped a toe – or dived enthusiastically – into the Biennial (which opened last month), you’ll likely have visited its Walker Art Gallery offering. There, the catalogue tells us, we’ll find ‘densely material works which interweave practices exploring personal and colonial legacies within an ornate building and national collection founded on the merchant wealth of the city’.

Included in its display is Nour Bishouty (whose heritage encompasses Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Canada), one of a trio of artists forming this year’s LAAF visual arts strand. Bishouty’s constellation of works, collectively titled Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, has, at its centre, Al-Wadi (top), an artwork depicting a Bedouin tribe in Jordan.

Made by the artist’s father, Ghassan, it is the departure point for a wider, thoughtful installation, which includes carvings of animals, a beautiful photo-collage, and textiles – all of which speak to lives lived in the shadow of cultural and practical erasure. Nothing is lost except nothing at all except what is not had, feels especially poignant against the current geopolitical backdrop.

At the World Museum is British-Iraqi visual artist and culture worker, Sarah al Sarraj’s time-collapsing work, Limbs of the Lunar Disc: Isthmus Ancient River. In a practice embracing painting, comics, and game engines, Al Sarraj reflects on the imperial violence at the root of the world as we know it, leaning into, instead, land, spirit, and ancestry to explore, reimagine and propose alternative realities.

In her new video work, Limbs of the Lunar Disc: Isthmus Ancient River, the artist invites us to ‘follow a [far future] Ancestor on a journey down the river of time’. Allowing for a more critical perspective on our place in – and impact on – the world, history, and the generations to follow, it will be situated in the museum’s World Cultures Gallery. And if, like us, this kind of speculative world-building is your jam, you can join the artist on Saturday (12 July) for a performance lecture drawing on ‘non-Western conceptions of space and time, incorporating quantum physics, liberation theory, and the work of Black Quantum Futurism and scholar Jackie Wang.’

Completing LAAF’s arts offer is architect, artist, and urban heritage strategist, Mohamed Gohar’s The Alexandrian, based at Yamama Café and Bar on Parliament Street. Ruminating on the evolution of Egypt’s second largest city’s urban and built environment, The Alexandrian considers its rich cultural history to explore a present-day Alexandria ‘facing,’ says Gohar, ‘long-impacting economic, demographic and social challenges.’ For more insight, you can join him for an informal artist talk on 16 July.

Across a packed programme, other highlights dealing with the slippery nature of nostalgia include a night of film (at FACT Liverpool), collectively titled Archiving Nostalgia. Lebanese director Evelyne Hlais’ 2023 short, He Looked At Me, creatively responds to a documentary shot in the aftermath of a massacre relating to her hometown. Considering questions of agency, heritage and authorship, Hlais wanted ‘to create a film with the purpose of gaining “ownership” of the images of my village.’

Also screening is Taqwa Bint Ali x NOWNESS’ 2025 short Memories of a Wedding, framing marriage ceremonies as cultural event, weaving together traditions, ancestry and familial bonds soon – or yet – to be made. ‘Through Memories of a Wedding,’ says the director, ‘I wanted to explore how traditions anchor us, how they keep us connected to our origins, and how they continue to evolve without losing their essence.’

Reflecting on the success of a 1980s Bollywood romance film in Algeria, Amine Hattou’s feature length, Janitou, rounds out the evening. Using the nostalgia for this cinematic sensation as a lens, Hattou ‘explores what love means in today’s Algerian society,’ and ‘the emotional identity of a traumatized generation’.

On 16 July, an evening of readings and discussion (at the Bluecoat) featuring writers Mazen Maarouf, and Anwar Hamed, along with editor, Basma Ghalayini, is inspired by Comma Press’ short story collection, Palestine – 1. Using genre fiction tropes, the publication, a prequel to 2019’s Palestine + 100, collectively looks back from the Nakba of 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Storytelling as eye-opening rallying call, given current events, it takes on an especially crucial, poignant dimension. The first of a pair of Comma Press events, it is followed later in the week with food and readings from the capital of Yemen, with The Book of  Sana’a.

LAAF’s stated aim is to spark ‘informed debate that explores, and increases, appreciation of Arab people and their rich cultures’; with these events and others besides, this 2025 edition seems particularly well-poised to fulfil that mission.

Mike Pinnington

LAAF 2025 launches this Friday. For full listings and details, you can download the festival brochure, here

Images: Nour Bishouty and Ghassan Bishouty, 0°, 0° (1981-83, 2022). Courtesy of Gallery 44 and SAVAC, Toronto Canada. Photography by Darren Rigo; Exhibition Limbs of the Lunar Disc, by Sarah-al-Sarraj, 2025, photography by Devika Bilimoria; Mohamed Gohar, detail, from The Alexandrian series

A recent graduate set to stage performances at Stockport Garrick Theatre in July, Manchester-based queer performance artist Lula Braimbridge talks to Anna Marsden about embracing nudity, discomfort and the gaze…

Usually, when it comes to female performance art there are two involved parties: the watcher and the watched. As the performer places themselves in a position to be observed, the people stare back. But who is in control? Where does the power lie, how will the dynamic play out? I imagine it as a kind of see-saw; eternally unbalanced, constantly teetering, forever destined to rise and fall, an everlasting lack of equilibrium. I am fascinated by what it is to be watched, what it is to put oneself in a position to be seen.

In my quest to dissect these see-saws of mine, I have an insightful conversation with Manchester-based queer performance artist Lula Braimbridge. She is somewhere in Somerset distracted by robins; I can sometimes hear a piano in the background. “I think a lot about breaking the spectacle of being watched, it’s kind of like on-going research”, she begins.

Graduating from Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University last year, and a MADE IT 2024 exhibiting artist, Braimbridge’s practice combines sculpture with her naked form to transcend and reclaim discomfort. “It was this thing of ‘I’m naked, I’m vulnerable and uncomfortable but I’m confronting that and sitting with it and holding it’.” In a performance at Pink Manchester in Stockport earlier this year, a naked Lula rocked backwards and forwards, held and supported by a glinting, silver crescent, watched on by a crowd. It is this structure of being watched that Lula is attempting to remove within her work. “We all are in a sense watching and observing each other [in everyday life]. I aim to change the performer-audience relationship to invite us to exist as equals in a shared space rather than as a spectacle and spectator”.

As a woman with herself on display to be watched at will, where does this situate her practice? Her work is not intended as a feminist statement nor is it a play on power dynamics, but rather “an exploration into humanness” at its most elementary. “What is it for you to feel uncomfortable to look at me?”, she wonders. Her nakedness is a return to this notion of simply being a body, Lula is not “shocking for the sake of shocking.”

It is tricky to the point of impossibility for her to “perform something without necessarily having objectification involved”, especially with male onlookers who are hyperaware and, perhaps, uncomfortable with their feelings on the naked, female form. Lula is sitting with this discomfort and her lack of control in an endeavour to unpick the male gaze. She cannot possibly control the gaze of any one individual, so it seems her focus instead is on the balance of equals and how this becomes a coping mechanism to the patriarchy as a structure.

It will really stick with me; her ideas of humanness and bodies, that sometimes it is as simple as taking care of one another’s vessels in “this world that is sort of born out of not taking care of us. How do we allow ourselves to just be… Us?” She wonders aloud a lot in our conversation, framing questions with answers she hasn’t quite figured out yet but, sometimes not knowing is enough. As we bring our conversation to an end however, she asks herself a question that she does have an answer to. How do you find the balance between audience and performer? She pauses, considers. Then, decidedly, “I am moving through this with gentleness and softness.”

Anna Marsden

See Braimbridge at upcoming collaborative performances with artists Martha Barr, Jamie Moran and Madeleine Vietmeier – where audience members are invited to draw, write, think, or just sit still. Thursday 10, Wednesday 16 and Tuesday 22 July 2025, with Brut Life Drawing at Stockport Garrick Theatre, Wellington Road South, Stockport SK3 0EJ – £14-16 tickets on Everntbrite

Call-out for ‘curious wanderers and adventurers’ – interested in going on walks with Braimbridge? Contact the artist through Instagram: @lula_bluee

“City as shadow, spectre, crucible.” With Ripped Backsides, author Richard Cabut invites us on a free-wheeling trip through noir cities, finds Mike Pinnington…

In Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides – aptly named for Iggy Pop’s The Passenger – the author takes us on a free-wheeling trip through what he describes as the ‘ruined maps of the noir cities’. An evocative six words that. Fortunately, what follows – organised geographically from Amsterdam to Warsaw –  delivers on the poetic imagery Cabut summons in this turn of phrase.

This is a book as time-travel and encounters with parallel universes that, today perhaps, seem more out of reach than ever – even if they can still be glimpsed, even visited. Cabut’s dispatches from invisible cities offer a balm to those (all of us, I suspect, whether we realise it or not) fatigued by contemporary encounters with urban spaces, often largely dictated to us by wayfinding apps.

This is no typical travelogue or city guide (though it masquerades – occasionally is – both). There is, for one thing, a cut-up feel to some of the despatches here; memory and thought coalesce, organised by fragment. Which works better than that might sound. In his foreword, fellow traveller Jeff Young tells us that Ripped Backsides ‘inhabits a space between anxiety and uncertainty,’ that it is situated somewhere in the ‘territory of notebook and dream diary’. Cabut himself tells us in his intro that, among other things, we should expect ‘a literary mosaic/montage… a hauntological drift… a wild catalogue of snapshots…’

These, then, are deep topography transmissions received, scratchy static in-tow, through the ether. Because, while Cabut’s epistles include reportage – from London, Manchester, New York, etc. – what we have here is something of a City and the City scenario; we are reading versions of places that once existed, or exist only to those that can properly intuit and access them, or perhaps lie dormant and will exist once more at some unspecified moment in the future. As Cabut says, they are ‘fucked up visions’ from ‘beneath the streets’.

That isn’t to say there aren’t truths here, or usable information with which to navigate the world – you just wouldn’t necessarily find them in a Lonely Planet Guide (nor would you necessarily want to!). In Amsterdam: ‘People read Malraux at the tram stop for secrets of human soul. Spoiler – people are even more unhappy than anyone thinks.’ And, later in the Dutch capital: ’People masturbate to texts of revolutionary politics. The money shot is Hollywood redemption.’

What about in the sunnier climes of Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid? We segue from high art to pop culture and criticism by way of wry observation by the hoi polloi at the drop of a hat – or turn of the page. In Catalunya, we’re given a vista of the storied football clubs’ Camp Nou stadium, then marshalled by messrs Messi, Suarez and Neymar: halcyon days of recent memory for the Culés. Simultaneously, this is ‘City as movie. The belief in directors to choose from the maelstrom of everything only those details that comprise certain significance. Do people buy into those meanings?’ And, a few entries later: ‘Art happens in high heel shoes. Senselessly. Fassbinder is aware.’

At times, it is reportage as cinematic endeavour – you can practically hear the projector, see the motes of life caught in its glare. Everywhere there seems there is an inciting incident, a drama about to unfold. A city about to awaken, drift into eternal sleep, or reinvent itself, fashioning something from the ruins of the past. In Berlin, Cabut observes, ‘We inhabit the Trümmerfilm, or the rubble aesthetic. Remake and rerun.’ While, in New York, a ‘Passer-by says: American nightmare is unforgiving. Stating the obvious is greatest transgression in poetry, film, city.’ And: ‘City as unspooling film: Narrative device – dramatis personae put in difficult predicament/Escape/But only to even more punishing predicaments/Again and again/The end.’

Ripped Backsides is city as shadow, spectre, crucible. From Derrida to Fisher, Brecht to Baudrillard – they’re all here, join the party, Cabut seems to say. But late stage capitalism, try as it might, has not yet stripped us of such thought and thinking, of ways to better navigate space and life, of manoeuvres dictated by more than mere commerce and lunch hours and life admin.

Cities aren’t, as they increasingly appear on the surface, simply sanitised spaces with stop-offs for high-street coffee and Instagrammable moments. Well-disguised they may be, but what they are, as ever, is alive. They are characters in their own movie – our own movie – not merely places to be gamified or hacked. A dérive through the demi-monde, this little miracle of a book – which should be tucked snugly in the back pocket of any budding flaneur/flaneuse out there – is a timely, energising reminder.

Mike Pinnington      

Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides, published by Far West Press, is out now     

Images © Richard Cabut/Far West Press

Askance tales of a storied city, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Stephen Clarke’s record of a “brief moment” that nevertheless offers up a multi-lens cultural reckoning…

It’s the city that never sleeps; the place where you can take a walk on the wild side.

One of the world’s most filmed cities, it has been endlessly mediated; through cinema, but also song, TV, theatre, art and more. We all think we know it, can picture it, hear it, even; and can imagine scenes playing out on its streets (that aren’t, funnily enough, paved with gold), in loft apartments, and atop eminently recognisable buildings.

When a nameless, almost silhouette of a figure waves down a taxi-cab, just out of shot, you think you hear a strangled, exasperated: “I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin here!” Meanwhile, shuttered shop-fronts jostle, incongruously, with huge, aspirational billboard ads for DKNY: star of this particular scene the Statue of Liberty might be, but grime and grit is rarely too far from view.

Rooftops. They hum with and foreshadow the still to come parkour-style police chases, in which a crook thumbs his nose at authority, screaming “made it ma! Top of the world!”, only seconds later to trip on his own hubris, falling, so that he clings on by his fingernails to the building’s edge, before plunging to his death.

At the end of the block, nestled alongside those trademark yellow taxi-cabs, we can take our pick of fast-food from Pizza, Big Wok, and Khyber Kabab. This, after all, is the city home to the most languages spoken per head of population anywhere in the world – New York was, and continues to be, built on immigration.

Landing on another image from Stephen Clarke’s New York 1995–1996 (a new photobook from the prolific Café Royal Books), we’re confronted with a haunting by architecture, in the shape of the Twin Towers of One World Trade Center and Two World Trade Center. They’re not front and centre, however, as many a photographer would choose to stage a picture of them. Instead, shot from (presumably) across the Hudson River, they somehow loiter in the background, uncertain. Knowing what we know today, they have acquired a ghostly, not quite present, transparent quality.

The Empire State Building is given similar treatment by Clarke (top). It has been edged out of the foreground, one populated by a vertiginous architectural hotch-potch of indeterminate provenance. Still, its status as cultural signifier means that its mere presence recalls – cannot help but recall – countless moments from cinema history (frequently from the third act). It has been climbed by a doomed King Kong, played host to perhaps the ultimate tear-jerking proposal in An Affair to Remember, and the pastiche/homage paid to it by Sleepless in Seattle. And, for eight hours and five minutes, it is the subject of Andy Warhol’s Empire.

Inadvertently conjuring tributes, laments and everything in-between, New York 1995–1996 is photographer Clarke’s record of what he describes as but a “brief moment” in the city’s history. The photographs evoke, he says, “a time when I became a New Yorker for one week.” The ‘moment’ the pictures capture punctuate a tumultuous period: from the AIDS crisis and the deaths of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to the outset of Rudi Giuliani’s term as mayor and the relative naivete (even if it didn’t seem so at the time) of a world which would, from 11 September, 2001, be forever changed.

Dualities abound: this is at once a time of sitcoms Seinfeld (below), and Friends, but also of the nihilistic casual sex and psychopathy of Larry Clark’s Kids. NYC is a city haunted by addiction (Abel Ferrara, The Addiction) and Patrick Bateman poseurs, yet it is a place whose streets people of course continue to flock to, streets, versions of them anyway, captured and continuously presented to us in a flood of simulacra.

From our current vantage point, then, these are photographs offering a multiple-lens reckoning, even as they look askance at the city and its icons of the built environment. Tourist snaps they aren’t. Such is New York’s cultural heft and baggage, however, that the blurring of the line between reality and otherwise is irresistible. Contained within each and every one of these images is a veritable tsunami of involuntary cultural recall.

Slippage between the layers, the real and hyperreal, is at this point unavoidable. In a chapter dedicated to New York in Ripped Backsides, his book ‘tracing ruined maps of the noir cities’, Richard Cabut writes: “Man says city isn’t a place or a movie or a painting, it’s a play about the rehearsal of a play. Like in that film we once saw.”

The film in question is likely Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre director, Caden Cotard, sets about making a massive production, the lines between fiction and reality indistinct. “There are millions of people in the world,” says Cotard, “and none of those people is an extra.” In another fragment from Ripped Backsides, Cabut, aptly, regards New York as a “City of unspooling film.”

New York, New York: a city so great they named it twice. City as filmic entity, an idea – or, more accurately, a palimpsest of ideas, each inseparable from the next. This is city as proliferation, a symphony of meaning, learned and transmitted via the screen, projecting at 24 frames per second – even within the bounds of a single photograph.

Mike Pinnington

New York 1995–1996 by Stephen Clarke is available now through Café Royal Books

All images © Stephen Clarke

Tracking a philosophical line across the city, Mike Pinnington reports on drifting purposefully through the 13th edition of Liverpool Biennial…

Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK, proposes, says director Sam Lackey, to explore and expose the city’s foundations, by connecting international artists with its histories, people and the very ground we walk on. That latter element is particularly apt this time for those after the best BEDROCK experience.

While every Biennial (any city-wide festival for that matter) encourages and very often rewards drifting purposefully, this 13th edition has it at its very core. Not least because an artist you come across at one venue or site, may, you note, also have work elsewhere. Plotting out a course in anticipation, with your subsequent meaningful meandering, you track a literal and philosophical line, becoming better aware of otherwise overlooked stuff of the city along the way.

My own odyssey started at RIBA North, still the temporary home to Tate Liverpool. It is, it must be said, an underwhelming beginning. It is somehow flat; there is little energy, or synergy between the works brought together here. Try as they might, Sheila Hicks’ Grand Boules, which (like much of this display) seem somehow incidental, out of place, can’t tie the space together. Fred Wilson’s Flag (2009) – ironically monochrome – cuts through. Its African and Caribbean flags, drained of colour, represent loss, and the lives devastated by the Transatlantic Slave Trade; but they also suggest hope, renewal, opportunity. These largely blank canvases await African stories still to be told, free of the yoke of Colonialism.

I head next to the Bluecoat, where things improve dramatically, with Liverpool born Nigerian-German Amber Akaunu’s specially commissioned film, Dear Othermother (top). A moving, gently profound documentary-style exploration and celebration of the friendships forged – in-part out of necessity – by single mothers (and their children) in Toxteth, it speaks subtly to circumstance, class and geography. It also highlights, inadvertently or otherwise, the rarity with which we get to hear Scouse accents platformed in this sector, not least in Liverpool.

Further down the gallery’s corridor you’ll find Odur Ronald’s aluminium passports hanging poignantly above vacant chairs (Muly’ Ato Limu – All in One Boat, 2025). Addressing questions of borders, who might reasonably expect to pass through them – and who might not – it conjures the people and lives of those suggested only by their absence, and the cruelly just out of reach passports.

Still at the Bluecoat, Alice Rekab’s ongoing Bunchlann, Buncharraig (which translates from Irish Gaelic as Origin Family/Bedrock) is a complex, multi-layered representation of the mixed-race Irish artist’s identity. It is also a kind of personal Wunderkammer, full of artefacts, allusions and clues. There is the book-case with a copy of Cogadh na Reann (H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds); a pair of gargoyles as narcissi lost in their returned gaze in household mirrors; the beautiful collaged Family Lines – Samir My Father, in the Old Studio. It is an intimate, personal work laying bare the complicated composite picture of self, one I plan to return to to better explore.

Onwards to the Walker, which has as many artists on display as anywhere, making it a good, quick hit for those wanting to drill straight into BEDROCK. Karen Tam’s incredibly beautiful and ornate marble-effect Dreamstone quartet of cast resin works resemble sublime, elemental scenes, conjuring illusory worlds and old techniques. Tam is also resident at China Town’s Pine Court, where the artist and curator’s installation, Scent of Thunderbolts (2024), takes inspiration from Cantonese opera. Addressing and serving a Chinese community historically so overlooked, it provides a setting for sonic memory.

Speaking of journeys through sound, duo Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic incorporate – to great effect – a throbbing soundtrack (Toxteth Dub Sonic Soundscape Vol. 07) to their Afro-futuristic monument, Concrete Roots / Griots Epic Stories from the Black Atlantic (2025). Constructed in-part with sheets of dyed indigo – a commodity of great value during the Slave Trade – their work looks back to Liverpool’s murky past while proposing a contemporary black culture incorporating elements from African, American, British, and Caribbean peoples. A highly effective combination of the aural, physical, and fragmented texts (that read like cut-ups referring to key moments and flashpoints of Liverpool’s recent histories), it demands attention.

By contrast, Cevdet Erek’s Away Terrace: Anfield, Goodison, II, Split, might almost go unnoticed. Notable initially for what is absent, these unobtrusive constructions – as the titles suggest – depict versions of the city’s storied football clubs’ stadia. Wall-mounted and resembling, more or less, artwork frames, they perhaps suggest that what happens on a football pitch could, at least occasionally, be considered to be within the realms of art. But Erek is just as concerned with the onlookers at the match – those with home advantage as well as the siege mentality forced upon or adopted by the away support (indicated here in smaller gold leaf sections).

Liverpool, for so long synonymous with football and the wider culture that surrounds it, can rarely have hosted an artist treating the subject matter with as much respect and consideration as Erek does. This is confirmed by another work, Away Terrace (Us and Them), at 20 Jordan Street in the Baltic Triangle. The artist’s large-scale installation is soundtracked by intoxicating rhythms representing ‘home’ and ‘away’ fans – the us and them of the title. It’s a great example of art as transportation, whisking viewers away to matchday scenes of getting lost amid chanting masses and 90 minutes of fierce partisan support. And, with the city having just witnessed a season of seismic events – Liverpool’s 20th title win, and Everton men’s final game played at their historic Goodison home – Erek’s works (all made this year) feel pretty zeitgeisty.

A stone’s throw away, you’ll bump once more into Odur Ronald at, of all places, SEVENSTORE, a kind of high end high street fashion retailer. Of all of the Biennial’s non-art spaces, it is perhaps among the least typical. And, yet, it is the perfect host to the artist’s No Hurry (2020), a memory of a sneaker-loving friend running late, it is in the form of a shining pair of Converse made in Ronald’s trademark scrap metal. So convincing are they, I confess that I looked for a good while at the rows of trainers as if I was carefully considering which pair to try on and buy before I spotted Ronald’s All Stars!

Being in such close proximity to Erek’s stadium, the shoes put me in mind of the association Liverpool has with fashion – especially trainers. This association is thought by many to have originated with Liverpool Football Club’s early trips abroad to face European opposition in the 1960s, when they would be followed by their fans, who brought back with them loads of new sportswear. Between them, Erek and Ronald represent key narrative threads of the city’s cultural touchstones – and of this Biennial: international artists with perspectives and perceptions formed elsewhere, that nevertheless resonate with and contribute to what is, temporarily, the home of their artwork.

Such subtle, sometimes indirect connections abound; for the casual observer, there are few statement, or headline works to hang onto in BEDROCK’s make-up – very little of the spectacle or ‘name’ artists one might associate with Biennials past. One such higher profile inclusion, Turner-Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price’s HERE WE ARE (2025), fails to convince. A large-scale speculative yet didactic presentation on why Catholic Churches – so crucial to those flocking to the region from Ireland and further afield – might share DNA with modernist architecture, I can’t help but think it would have made a more successful visual essay than it does an artwork. Certainly, somehow, there seems an opportunity missed here in getting to grips with the story of the heritage and make-up of Liverpool through those arriving, contributing and staying here.

This Biennial, then, is at its best in the quieter moments. It also requires of the visitor attentiveness, so that we discover rather than ignore or blindly step over works like Mapping the Wasteland (trail), the paving tiles of Kara Chin that animate Berry Street. What Chin calls ‘litter fossils’ come in the form of discarded coffee cups, raiding seagulls and more. Setting us on a journey between venues, they signal that this is a biennial of art as punctuation rather than bombast.

Once this dawns on you, it is all the richer for it. Its curator, Marie-Anne McQuay (who has a longstanding association with the city she calls home), understands the grammar of Liverpool, and has sought, through BEDROCK, to foreground the many narratives that intersect here. With artists both home and abroad telling the sometimes knotty, intertwined stories of the city, its success – or otherwise – relies upon us bringing a similarly close reading to Liverpool.

Mike Pinnington

Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK continues at various venues across the city until 14 September

Images, from top: Amber Akaunu, Still from ‘Dear Othermother’, 2024. Courtesy of the Artist; Odur Ronald, ‘Muly’Ato Limu – All in One Boat’ 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Bluecoat. Photography by Mark McNulty; Karen Tam譚嘉文‘Dreamstone I, II, III & IV’, 2024. Liverpool Biennial 2025 atWalker Art Gallery. Photography by Stuart Whipps; Cevdet Erek, Away Terrace (Anfield) 2025, Away Terrace (Goodison) 2025, Away Terrace II 2025, Away Terrace (split) 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Walker Art Gallery. Photography by Mark McNulty; Kara Chin, ‘Mapping the Wasteland – Can and Bottle’, Liverpool Biennial 2025 on Berry Street. Photography by Rob Battersby