Culture Diary w/c 24-06-2024

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond…

Monday – Brendan Lyons: After/Before (by appointment until Friday) @ Bridewell Studios & Gallery – FREE 

Short-run show for artist, Brendan Lyons, who has previously exhibited at the John Moores Painting Prize (2020) and as part of 2022′s Refractive Pool. Here, Lyons displays more than 20 small scale paintings (made entirely of paint).

Tuesday – Fancy Dance + Recorded Q&A 8pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Native American director Erica Tremblay’s debut, Fancy Dance, is a contemporary set film that interrogates colonial violence faced by generations of Indigenous people – more often than not, women. Screened by Reclaim The Frame and Native Spirit Festival, it is followed by a recorded Q&A with Tremblay.

Wednesday – The Warriors 8.30pm @ Storyhouse Chester – £9.90

A cult classic, Walter Hill’s The Warriors – set in a near future dystopian New York – sees the titular gang, falsely accused of murder, face an onslaught of misplaced revenge on rival turf as they battle to get home to safety. Notable today for its vision of a pre-gentrification NYC, at the time of its 1979 release, critic Roger Ebert declared it a ‘ballet of male violence’. Can You Dig It?!

Thursday – Beyond Van Gogh @ Exhibition Centre Liverpool – £13.20-£26.40

‘Witness over 300 masterpieces, including instantly-recognizable classics such as “The Starry Night”, “Sunflowers” and “Café Terrace at Night”, now freed from their frames’ goes the blurb for Beyond Van Gogh, opening today at Liverpool’s dockside exhibition centre. When I was a kid, I didn’t appreciate the depth and wonder of his paintings until seeing them, framed (as opposed to in postcard form), in Amsterdam’s dedicated Van Gogh museum. Can this mediated experience of his work ‘flowing across multiple surfaces’ (walls, floor and ceiling, then?) offer the same depth of engagement as witnessing first-hand the glorious texture and thickness of paint? Only one way to find out.

LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight 6pm @ Open Eye Gallery – FREE 

Building on LOOK Climate Lab, here, three separate projects are brought together for LOOK Photo Biennial. Mattia Balsamini’s Protege Noctum (above) trains its lens on the ‘disappearance of the night’, documenting the effects of artificial light on the night sky; Erosion by Stephanie Wynne explores the structural waste of war via the rubble of WW2; and Melanie King’s Precious Metals considers the cosmic genesis, harmful extraction and use of silver and palladium in photography. “The artists,” says Open Eye curator Max Gorbatskyi, “use exquisite form and poetic subjects to firmly state the urgency of sustainable practices, whether in art or urban planning.”

Big Joanie 7pm @ Quarry, Liverpool – £12

Formed in the heart of London’s DIY scene, ‘Black Feminist Sistah’ punk duo, Big Joanie, land at Liverpool’s Quarry venue. Support comes in the form of the DSM IV, Lula Nova and Steel.

Friday – Liverpool Art Fair 12pm @ Royal Liver Building, Liverpool – FREE 

The annual, open submission, affordable art fair returns for this, its 10th anniversary edition. Featuring more than 200 artists, expect a wide range of styles, materials and genre in as grand a setting as they come.

Saturday – Another View: a critical discussion on accessibility and the landscape 2pm @ Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunlight – £10 

An exhibition of women artists, Lady Lever Gallery’s Another View, offers an alternative perspective on British landscape art. Using the show as its departure point, today’s panel discussion is chaired by NML curator Dr Melissa Gustin, and features artist Lucy Jones, zoologist and environmental enthusiast Bushra Schuitemaker and academics Dr Morag Rose (Human Geography) and Dr Noreen Masud (English Literature).

Sunday – Exhibition Closing: Michelle Williams Gamaker and Dahong Hongxuan Wang 6pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool – FREE   

Using moving image works to explore cinema and identity, this pair of exhibitions retell the stories of those traditionally marginalised by colonial narratives. In Williams Gamaker’s multi-strand Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass, the artist celebrates and interrogates the movies she grew up with; while Hongxuan Wang – who has played Chinese American film star Anna May Wong on various occasions – exhibits Role Model, a film reflecting on and paying homage to the star’s career and afterlife. Read our review

The 400 Blows 5pm @ FACT Liverpool – £8

Paris on Screen season continues with Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (or Les quatre cents coups if you’re feeling fancy), which follows the escapades and (mostly) travails of school kid, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), exposed at a young age to the wild life of the original French title. The director’s semi-autobiographical debut, it is a key work of the French New Wave.

Mike Pinnington

Images/media, from top: The 400 Blows (BFI restoration); Mattia Balsamini; Big Joanie, Today ft. Kim Deal; Michelle Williams Gamaker, Anna make up, photographed by Ellen Jane Rogers