Art For Whose Sake?

biennial.

Art For Whose Sake?

When the Arts Council announced that they’d pulled the plug on Anthony MacCall’s column of steam yesterday, we guess the only real surprise was that it took them so long to come to their decision. So much time, and so much money. We kind of figured that it wasn’t going to work when the Cultural [...]

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Lorenzo Fusi moves to Open Eye

As the arts transfer window closes, the Biennial curator Lorenzo Fusi has moved across the city, to be the new artistic director for the Open Eye. Lorenzo curated the 2010 and 2012 Liverpool Biennial, latterly with help from new Director, the very hands on Sally Tallant, and we always wondered how that relationship would work. [...]

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Love Your Galleries This Christmas

You know what SevenStreets loves to do between Christmas and New Year (if that walk to Moel Famau is rained off?) – go visit an art gallery. There’s something about their hushed, contemplative surroundings that acts like a sorbet on frazzled palettes. Just a mooch around the pre-Raphaelites of the Lady Lever, the history of [...]

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Looper: The Torture of Media Installations

With apologies to Belinda Carlisle, heaven is not a place on Earth, but hell is. I was once told that, in the Mersey Maritime Museum, you were welcomed by LCD screens showing a video loop. This doesn’t sound so bad, just the sort of thing cooked up by your typical creative advertising goons in their [...]

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So, Farewell then, Biennial…

Now, as the shutters are being pulled down on the Copperas Hill building, the Cunard and the Munro, and artworks across the city are being bubble wrapped, disassembled, packed away and posted back to the studios and galleries of the world, it’s comforting to know that one of our favourite pieces will remain. Destined never [...]

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The 7 Things You Shouldn’t Miss This Biennial

This is your ten day warning. You have exactly that time to either a) concoct some sorry-ass excuse as to why you never found the time to immerse yourself in the Biennial, b) go make up for lost time, follow our recommendations this weekend and see what you can, or c) go say a final [...]

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Eavesdropping on Art

Does the Walker’s collection talk to you? If so, what does it say? That’s the intriguing starting point for a series of free performances taking place at the gallery this week (15 – 17 November) by artist Aaron Williamson (pic). With Walker’s super-sized Victorian canvasses framing many a gripping tale, Williamson researched the collection and [...]

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Biennial Review: Two things Searle Tried To Ruin

There are two Biennial installations that turn your optic nerves into a quivering wreck. And, speaking as ones who love a bit of optic shenanigans, they also happen to be our favourites. Refraction, a lone essential outpost on the same floor as the underwhelming New Contemporaries (honestly, there’s a video installation that had crashed, and [...]

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Biennial Radar: Wendy Williams ‘Journeys End’

Art blurb becomes art in ‘Journey’s End’ where planes and boats and houses made from recycled art mags represent a creative and geographical journey. After being awarded a bursary to visit and exhibit in Tromso, Norway in 2011, artist Wendy Williams needed to find a way of ‘travelling light’ with her work. She had started [...]

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Biennial Review: Sabelo Mlangeni

Sabelo Mlangeni offered that “two seemingly unrelated works are placed in conversation to each other and perhaps destabilise what people imagine South Africa is” in his 2012 Biennial photography exhibition My Storie (2012) and Men Only (2008-09) at the Tea Factory and it seems that his hopes for a dialogue have been realised. The presentation [...]

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Biennial Radar: Bill Is Dead, WCS

Wolstenholme Creative Space’s Biennial has seen darkly mysterious dinner parties (with another Inhospitable Supper Club happening next week) and their in-situ installation, Inhospitable Landscape (the circular saws were still buzzing the day before they were due to launch, when SevenStreets popped round for tea), this week sees the mighty talented writer/performer Craig Sinclair presenting another [...]

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Biennial Review: Open Eye

If, as George Michael slyly infers, you’re looking for fast love, can SevenStreets make a suggestion? Don’t look for it in Japan. If Open Eye’s Biennial strand shows anything (and it shows more than most) it’s that those lunchtime assignations, those snatched trysts and fumbles can have repercussions way, way down the line. Lunchtime love [...]

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Biennial Radar: Sabelo Mlangeni, My Storie & Men Only

This year’s Biennial marks the world premiere presentation of My Storie (2012) by South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni which, shown alongside his earlier series Men Only (2008-09), he hopes will prompt people to question their perceptions of South Africa. Mlangeni tells us more… What’s Happening? I am exhibiting two photographic bodies of work at the [...]

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Biennial Radar: The Anfield Home Tour

The Biennial isn’t just about discovering art in the city centre; and some of its most admirable and thought-provoking works are often commissioned to create and inspire social change in more deprived, out of town areas. This year that includes 2Up2Down and its regeneration of the old Mitchell’s bakery in Anfield, a long-term community project [...]

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All This Useless Beauty?

Somewhere deep in New Mexico, a desert full of hollows forms the Very Large Array telescope. Acres of discrete dishes. Insignificant alone. Game changing together. Working as one, the dishes can do something exponentially massive: map out the emptiness. Make sense of it. It’s joined up thinking like this that edges us closer to the [...]

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