“New mediums gave rise to considerations of how painting and painters might respond.” A trio of works demonstrate that painting’s engagement with photography and film continues to reverberate, finds Mike Pinnington…  

Prior to the 19th century arrival of photography, painting had been the undisputed visual recording device. It wasn’t, of course, always truthful. Nor was it democratic. Gentry and royalty – those able to pay for the privilege – would be flattered; a nip here, a tuck there, long before plastic surgery made such terminology commonplace, and longer still before editing software and apps made aesthetic tweaks the norm. With the possibility of near instantaneous image capture, painting’s role came under scrutiny. As one commentator said in 1839, photography was: “an invention… which could cause some alarm to our Dutch painters. A method has been found whereby sunlight itself is elevated to the rank of drawing master, and faithful depictions of nature are made the work of a few minutes.”   

Subsequent decades saw the birth of cinema (with the Lumière brothers holding the first ticketed screening of moving pictures in Paris, in 1895). And, as the next century dawned concerns grew, moving the artist Henrietta Clopath to remark in 1901 that: “The fear has sometimes been expressed that photography would in time entirely supersede the art of painting. Some people seem to think that when the process of taking photographs in colors has been perfected and made common enough, the painter will have nothing more to do.”

The rumours of painting’s impending death, however, had been greatly exaggerated. As we know, while its viability is periodically questioned (not least today), rather than its being superseded, what happened instead is that painters adapted to, were catalysed even, by the perceived threat. The new mediums of photography and film gave rise to considerations of how painting and painters might respond; either by going beyond the old tradition of performing the role of mirror on the world, or in open dialogue.

Writing on the conversation between film and photography, David Campany has said that the mediums remain significant for each other, “not just technically but aesthetically and artistically. Each has borrowed from and lent to the other. Each has envied the qualities of the other. And at key moments each has relied upon the other for its self-definition.” The exact same can said of painting, in view of such technological arrivistism. Painting’s engagement with both photography and film, at times simultaneously, continues to reverberate through the discipline, a point richly demonstrated by a trio of contemporary works now on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.

Via the woozy ambiguity of Eva Helene Pade’s 2025 painting, I mørket (In the dark), we are transported back to early 20th century Germany and the expressionism that represented a conscious move to address the challenges posed by new means of capturing the world. Marked by an urge to represent emotion, interiority and spirituality as opposed to facsimile, from Kandinsky to Schiele, Munch to Dix, this was a movement delving deep beneath the surface of its subject matter. Often, these were paintings of women – either muse or hysterics – by men. In the case of Pade’s modern-day take, however, in work she has described as a ‘surrender to the more metaphysical parts of the paintings,’ we find an artist depicting active female protagonists rather than passive subjects. I mørket (In the dark) – vivid, and the longer you look at it, somehow destabilising – feels at once fresh, relevant and literate.

Ella Kruglyanskaya, an artist who said that she wants her paintings to feel cinematic, is contending with the canonical problem of the representation of women. Her 2024 work, Odalisque in Blue (small) – featuring a naked female figure viewed from behind, looking back at us over her shoulder – finds Kruglyanskaya referencing the intersectional issues contained within the ‘Orientalist’ movement’s objectification of enslaved women. Situating representation of women in a contemporary context, her paintings blur disciplinary lines between art, illustration and the ubiquity of social media image-making. Speaking in a 2016 TDN interview about the sources and themes that proliferate in her practice, she said: “pop culture, art history, the history of painting, and the culture of cinema, photography – I think they all play into each other, back and forth.”

Gilles Deleuze has said that “The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other.” Along with the breadth of cultural reference points, what we see most often in the paintings of Ella Kruglyanskaya, which imply a tussle towards resolving the problem of representations of women, is a resolute decision that her women can rarely be construed as mere subjects of the gaze – a gaze often returned with a large helping of knowing side-eye. As Laura Robertson has observed: “the Female Gaze in Kruglyanskaya’s work stares right back.”

The language of cinema is more explicit still in Mise en scène (2025), a luminous and seductive painting by Louise Giovanelli. Drawn from a found image of a 1970s film, its title, from the French, means ‘to place on stage’, and refers to the means by which visual elements are arranged in a film – including props, the set and, of course, actors. In Giovanelli’s painting, the camera’s lens lands on and captures a woman seemingly amidst, lost even, in pure ecstasy. Superficially at least, it suggests a particular reading, one of sexual pleasure. In fact, belying assumptions borne of a lifetime’s worth of mainstream portrayals of women on screen, she is delighting in another act, that of taking communion.

The spectre haunting each of these works and, indeed, this piece of writing, is neither photography or film, but Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which introduced the theory of the ‘male gaze.’ In a later, 2003 essay, Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualizing Time and its Passing, Mulvey wrote: “I was preoccupied by Hollywood’s ability to construct the female star as ultimate spectacle, the emblem and guarantee of its fascination and power. Now, I am more interested in the way that those moments of spectacle were also moments of narrative halt, near stillness, that figure the halt and stillness inherent in the structure of celluloid itself. Then, I was concerned with the way Hollywood eroticized the pleasure of looking, inscribing a sanitized voyeurism into its style and narrative conventions. Now, I am more interested in the ways in which the presence of time itself can be discovered behind the mask of storytelling.”

Mulvey goes on to say that “new technologies allow the spectator time to stop, look and think.” But Giovanelli (and others channelling similar concerns), demonstrates that ‘old’ technology can be equally adept at providing that space; in the stillness of painting can be found a space that takes us beyond (the albeit still relevant) ‘woman as image’ narrative this trio of works might at first suggest.

Mike Pinnington

Works discussed are on display in the Walker Art Gallery‘s Contemporary displays 

Images, from top: Installation view of Louise Giovanelli, ‘Mise en scène’ (2025) at Walker Art Gallery © Pete Carr; other installation shots: Eva Helene Pade’s 2025 painting, I mørket (In the dark); Ella Kruglyanskaya’s 2024 painting, Odalisque in Blue (small); and Louise Giovanelli’s 2025 painting, Mise en scène, all MP

Reckoning with uncertain times, a group exhibition taking its name from a century old movement is a tonic, says Mike Pinnington…

Z – A – U – M. ZAUM. With its roots in the early 20th century Russian futurist movement, this was the name given to a language of experimentation beyond meaning (‘za – beyond’; ‘um – mind’). Developed by radical modernist poet, Aleksei Kruchenykh, it is said to have inspired Malevich (he of the black square), in “trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world…” with a new painterly language of colour and form outside established perimeters. Never fear: “In our art,” said Kruchenykh, “we already have the first experiments of the language of the future.”

ZAUM lends its name and, more than a century on, some of its intent, to an ambitious group exhibition currently on display at 50MV, an artist-run space in Sefton’s Waterloo. Across its 15 works, there is the suggestion of striving for new, different ways to address and reckon with our own uncertain times. Bridging the gap between then and now is Sir Terry Frost (1915–2003), renowned for his use of Cornish light, colour and shape, all of which informs the strikingly beautiful Newlyn Yellow (1996).

The space, though (formerly home to a high street newsagents), is otherwise populated with works made this decade (the majority of them this year), making this an exhibition of our moment, one that has otherwise come to be defined by an art that commonly, understandably, is overtly wrestling with the socio-political concerns of the day. ZAUM!, however, like its anti-language namesake, possesses a more gnomic – some may say more sophisticated – quality, implying philosophies, and answers, just out of reach.

James Bacchi-Andreoli (who, alongside Luke Skiffington, is the exhibition’s co-curator) mentions processes of accident and chance, unplanned encounters, and of losing and finding, all of which seem present in his gesso and coloured pencil odyssey, Inside Outside 1 – a fragmented cut-up grid of cul-de-sacs, wrong turns and happenstance. There is, similarly, something of the labyrinthine in the painstakingly hand-chiselled angular furrows of Sasha Holzer’s Walnut (above).

Jane K Morter‘s sculptural piece, meanwhile, seems to evoke a lost futures moodiness, with the brutalism-inflected wall work, Lightfold. Molly Thompson’s architectonic acrylic on panel construction, Transitional Measures, with what the artist describes as ‘off-kilter geometries’ invites us to adopt a topographic perspective; David Ryan’s eye-catching Zones 8 goes further still, putting one in mind of a zoomed out, abstracted Google Earth screen grab.

Alongside all of this form, there is certainly no lack of colour. Mike Carney‘s Untitled (above, detail) has a pleasingly outside-the-lines quality in its bleed of inky greens, oranges and blues on non-porous Yupo paper – a study in ‘visual and aural abstraction,’ says Carney. Clem Crosby’s fabulously named Almighty Meat is a frenetic riot of mostly primary colours, while Christopher Peterson’s Untitled is a tablet-like rune of symbology, its layers suggesting a puzzle to be solved. Safe to say: the chromatically inclined amongst us are covered.

Questing, colour and form are all here, then, combining multiple nods to the heyday of abstraction with an up-to-the-minute hue. A tonic of an exhibition, ZAUM! offers works defying current expectations of the visual arts landscape. To paraphrase the poet Kruchenykh: might we already have the first experiments of a new language of the future?

ZAUM! is on display @ 50MV Gallery until 28 June

Images: Installation photography, courtesy Luke Skiffington; Sasha Holzer, Walnut (2026); Mike Carney, Untitled (2024, detail)

Mike Pinnington

The great American road trip – the frontier and its trappings – serve as departure point for artist Ed Ruscha, and this tightly focused exhibition of his works, finds Mike Pinnington…

In 1956, Ed Ruscha – an artist JG Ballard said had ‘the coolest gaze in American art’ – embarked on a journey that, in many ways, would foreshadow a career and its concerns to follow. Leaving his Oklahoma City birthplace behind, he made his way west, driving along dusty highways and byways, to Los Angeles. En route, he was struck by the stark expanse of the landscape.

Signs of life came mostly in the form of gas stations, those uncanny waystations which punctuated his trip and the liminal spaces along the storied Route 66. Many of these he would capture with his camera, resulting in the photographs that led in 1963 to his first, now iconic artist book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (as well as an accompanying series of paintings, drawings and prints). These works speak to the great American road trip – the frontier and its trappings – and serve as departure point for a close, ongoing engagement with the signs and symbols of the US.

From its landscape and self-image (commonly projected onto the silver screen) – all of it a reflected, blurry version of what used to be called the American dream – Ruscha’s work gives us a front-row seat, inviting us along for the ride. Such aspects are brought together in tight focus in Tate Liverpool’s ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha.

The artist has said: “When I got going on the books … it was really the red meat of my work.” Fittingly, then, the show begins with the handsome ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS (1976), a monochromatic black and white work on paper that reads as declaration of intent, and as a reminder of Ruscha’s beginnings and continuing interest in graphic design. Nearby, a vitrine protects, among other items, second and third editions of Twentysix Gasoline Stations; above it, a 1970 lithograph presents a framed tactile-looking depiction of the book. If the constraints of viewing printed matter in this way frustrate somewhat, an adjacent digital display allows for a relaxed, leisurely look at this and other publications that echo throughout the following works herein.

From route 66, we nose our way through West Hollywood, arriving at the Sunset Strip. Drawn from photographs made in 1966 for Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (a series he revisited in 1995), the examples on display here invoke nothing if not the locale’s mythology. Shimmering with the heat haze of the blazing California sunshine, they call to mind movies made – and, no doubt, merely dreamt and imagined – here, at such industry haunts as Greenblatt’s Deli. Reminding us of Hollywood’s genius and propensity for artifice, Ruscha used razor blades and sandpaper to simultaneously deface and emphasise the filmic quality of these images.

Cinema and its history is rich subject matter for artist and audience. In Pools #1–#9 (1968), we recall the moneyed leisure/ennui on show in The Swimmer, made the same year. Frank Perry’s picture finds Burt Lancaster’s Ned Merrill swimming home via neighbourhood pools on a journey of middle-aged existentialist self-discovery. 1975’s semi-abstract Miracle #64, meanwhile, is at once shaft of celestial projector light, and a foreshadowing, at least to my mind’s eye, of David Lynch’s then yet to be made film, Lost Highway (1997). In that, it somehow suggests, perhaps even informs, and is drawn into, the mobius strip time loop of that film’s narrative; the two somehow meet along the road, to become fellow travellers, emphasising the enduring and fruitful conversation enjoyed between art and film.

Elsewhere, tools of the graphic design trade are once again to the fore; in Los Francisco San Angeles Portfolio (2001) and BLVD.-AVE.-ST. (2006), we see small- and large-scale experimentation with geometric patterns and grid systems the artist calls ‘metro plots’.  With PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL and DAILY PLANET (both 2003), Ruscha enlists his wonderfully named Boy Scout Utility Modern typeface, in ambiguous, intertextual works – one seemingly a reference to delaying the inevitable, the other environmental and pop culture comic book reference both – juxtaposing the text of their titles with vast mountainsides.

In the onomatopoeia of HONK (1962), we are brought neatly back to that grand North American symbol of liberation, the means by which Ruscha became Ruscha, the automobile. MAD SCIENTIST (1975) and HOLLYWOOD TANTRUM (1979) imply La La Land tropes – on-screen and off – touching yet again on visual art’s complex relationship to cinema. Like many a great film, ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha, is over before you know it; not, however, before one final nod in the direction of the intersecting of life and the movies, with the irresistibly apt – forgivably on-the-nose – selection of THE END #40 (2003). A staple of closing credits, it serves here as marker of the close of this exhibition – while leaving you yearning for an extended director’s cut.

Mike Pinnington

Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha continues @ Tate Liverpool until 14 June

Images: Ed Ruscha, Standard Study # 3 1963 © Ed Ruscha; Edward Ruscha, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS 1976; Ed Ruscha, Greenblatt’s Deli (Sunset Strip Portfolio) 1976, printed 1995 © Ed Ruscha; Ed Ruscha, HONK, 1962. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Ed Ruscha  

“This exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver.” Stephen Clarke rides shotgun through Tate Liverpool’s Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha… 

The text-based artwork, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS (1976), acts as the frontispiece to Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha at RIBA North. The exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver and his artist books acting as our guide. Our first stop is the seminal publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). This small book contains photographs taken by Ruscha along the highway, Route 66, between Los Angeles and Oklahoma. On a touch screen monitor next to its display case the viewer can leaf through a digital copy; and see other complete copies of seven of Ruscha’s classic books. These selected publications provide our itinerary, each one focusing attention upon the built environment – a suitable subject for a gallery at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Tanked up on gasoline, we are on the move. Our route is punctuated by text-based artworks. The large letters OK (1990) suggest that it is okay to continue our journey and, perhaps, reference Oklahoma as OK is the state’s abbreviated form as it would appear on a vehicle licence plate. It is worthwhile noting that Ruscha is an ‘Okie’ – a migrant to Los Angeles who has had to learn how to read this city. Our next guidebook is Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion-format book that unfolds to nearly twenty-five feet in length. We literally have to travel along this continuous image – the viewers’ eyes in motion as the book is read. In the gallery, six photographic prints represent the Strip. On the negatives for the prints Ruscha has applied a razor blade and sandpaper to distress each picture. The result is that we become aware of the artist’s hand that disrupts our view through the car window.

The next punctuation point is another text-based piece, DANCE? (1973). This piece uses foodstuffs – coffee, egg white, mustard, chilli sauce, ketchup and cheddar cheese – to produce the letters that stain the canvas. DANCE? functions as a juncture between the diners and nightclubs pictured in the photographs of the Strip and invites the sort of physical activity that could take place in the next series of photographs of swimming pools from the artist book Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). These pools seem to be the communal spaces of apartment complexes or, more likely, roadside motels. Motion is arrested as the still, uninviting pools wait for guests to arrive. Around the corner are photographs from Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967). It is a fanciful leap to consider drivers parking up to take advantage of the empty pools; however, both sets of work await intervention. The question function of Dance? becomes ‘Park?’ and ‘Swim?’

America, Her Best Product (1974) is the next punctuation and effectively introduces artworks that reference street maps. A set of aerial photographs of parking lots taken from a helicopter gives us the bird’s eye view or downward gaze that is the vantage point of the following painting and etchings. The painting BLVD. – AVE. – ST (2006), is dissected by thick pale bands across a light grey speckled ground which connotes the surface of the Los Angeles roads. The harshness of sunlight is apparent in the grey tones whilst a band of bright orange at the top of the canvas adds to the feeling of heat. This painting is supported by a group of small, coloured etchings that are comprised of lines and street names – reinforcing the reference to map reading. It is at this point in our journey that we move on to higher ground.

Snow-capped mountains that seemingly have no place in the hot desert of southern California are the background for two large paintings. These are overlaid with text: one reads DAILY PLANET (2002), while the other promises Pay Nothing Until April (2003). Are these billboard adverts that we drive past? A strong connection is made to the movie industry since The Daily Planet is the workplace of Clark Kent, and the snow-capped mountain is the logo for Paramount Pictures. At the close of this section the piece Miracle #64 (1975) depicts a strong shaft of light shining from the top left corner that cuts through the darkness of the background. It is often interpreted as a depiction of light emanating from a film projector, or alternatively a heavenly intervention; it could be seen more prosaically as the overhead light from a streetlamp.

The penultimate punctuation point is the word painting HONK (1962). Situated high on the wall, thus disrupting the flow, the piece breaks the silence of Miracle #64. At the close of this exhibition, references to the film industry take centre stage as the text pieces MAD SCIENTIST (1975) and HOLLYWOOD TANTRUM (1979) connote cinematic drama. Perhaps, the fate of the screenwriter was enacted by the minor drama of Royal Road Test (1967) – on display as a digital book – that documented Ruscha dropping a vintage typewriter from a speeding Buick. Did Ruscha take on the role of the scientist undertaking a mad experiment or was the typewriter thrown through the window as an act of aggression?

The exhibition closes with a final text-based artwork. THE END #40 (2003), is a depiction of the last few seconds of a movie, caught between frames. The two words, ‘The End’, are cut along the horizontal plane and so simulate the motion of the film. The dynamic of this exhibition has been the viewer moving through the landscape of southern California; however, the main concern has been the relationship between Ruscha’s books with his paintings, prints and photographs. The centrality of his publications is evident: it is clearly affirmed that Ruscha is the artist that does books.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha continues @ Tate Liverpool until 14 June

Images: Edward Ruscha, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS 1976; Ed Ruscha, OK (State I) 1990. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Ed Ruscha; Edward Ruscha, DAILY PLANET 2003 &PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL 2003

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