Setting Forth on a Voyage of Discovery with ChihChung Chang 張致中

“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...

Sacred & Profane: Haunted Paper

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...

Another Dimension – On Contemporary Drawing

“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...

Carreg Ateb: Vision or Dream? Reviewed

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...

A Singular Vision: Powell and Pressburger

With their celebrated masterpiece The Red Shoes currently showing on the big screen, Mike Pinnington considers the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger… When I think about the moments of movie magic...

Palestinian Storytelling, World-Building, and Time Travel: Our Preview of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) 2025

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...

Beyond Liverpool...
Blazing a trail through
the big wide world
12/01/2024
Mike Pinnington on Vallisaari island, Helsinki. Photograph by Laura Robertson

Field Trip: Helsinki, Finland – Happiness and Cultural Guardians

Taking in climate change at Helsinki Biennial, diversity at the Ateneum, and visiting contrasting new galleries in an art school and bar toilets (!), Mike Pinnington’s return to Finland’s capital city is a timely reminder...

Must hear...
The sounds of
The Double Negative
04/10/2024
Sex Swing - Golden Triangle LP Cover

God Unknown Records at 10

“I wanted to release music that I love, that really meant something. Something real.” This weekend sees God Unkinown Records mark a decade of releasing diverse, cutting-edge music from artists based all over...

Fill your boots...
unique, limited edition gifts
05/09/2019
Present Tense. Publish by The Double Negative, 2019.

Present Tense (2019) // Paperback // £14.99

Present Tense A decade since Liverpool EU Capital of Culture… What now?  Edited by Laura Robertson and Mike Pinnington ISBN 978-1-5272-4281-4 Published August 2019. Very limited edition run of 250 copies. Paperback, 96...