Community Post Type: News

This spring, Royal Albert Dock Liverpool will be home to The Fandangoe DISCOTECA – a vibrant micro-disco offering a unique opportunity to dance away life’s worries.

Created by multidisciplinary artist Annie Frost Nicholson, the dock will welcome the art installation for six weekends from 2nd March to 6th April, including Mother’s Day and Easter bank holiday weekend. Located in Britannia Courtyard by The Beatles Story, The Fandangoe DISCOTECA will invite visitors to step inside from 12pm-3pm and 4pm-7pm on Saturdays as well as Good Friday, and from 12pm-4pm on Sundays and Easter Monday.

The immersive installation brings together the old and the new by reimagining a K67 kiosk in partnership with K67 Berlin, a project dedicated to continuing the legacy of these modular architectural masterpieces. Once commonplace in 1960s Eastern Europe, the kiosks were often used as newspaper stands, car-parking attendant booths and more.

The now treasured design has been reimagined into a multicoloured space dedicated to supporting people with modern-day issues, ranging from everyday worries to grief and anxiety.

Perfect to experience with friends and family, the booth accommodates up to eight people, offering a chance to process feelings through a sense of togetherness. Dancers can choose from a vast selection of playlists curated by non-profit organisation, The Loss Project, or opt for a treasured tune to relive old memories. Plus, anyone looking for further mental health support can scan a QR code inside the kiosk for online resources.

Sean Morrison, estate manager at Royal Albert Dock, says: “We’re delighted to welcome such a unique installation to the dock and for a prolonged time too. The Fandangoe DISCOTECA is truly a one-of-a-kind experience and we encourage everyone who needs to shake off some steam or simply enjoy a dance to come along and step inside.”

Annie Frost Nicholson says: “We’re so thrilled to bring The Fandangoe DISCOTECA to the dock. We’re honoured to install it by The Beatles Story, which is a landmark for Liverpool’s cultural history and a poignant location to engage with the public over the many intersections of grief associated with music, nostalgia and memory.

“I absolutely love the city of Liverpool and its people; my dearly departed dad, born in Blackpool, left the country on a boat from the city at 15 to join the Merchant Navy, and I always associate the city with adventure and a spirit of togetherness that is rare and special. Thank you for welcoming us so kindly.”

The Fandangoe DISCOTECA’s residency at the dock marks the final location of its UK tour, having previously delighted visitors in Canary Wharf, Milton Keynes and Berlin, making it the last chance to experience this captivating installation.

Visit albertdock.com/the-fandangoe-discoteca for more information.

The Fandangoe DISCOTECA will be at Royal Albert Dock for six weekends from 2nd March to 6th April. It is free to enjoy and does not require pre-booking.

Opening times include:
Saturdays (and Good Friday): 12pm-3pm and 4pm-7pm
Sunday (and Easter Monday): 12pm-4pm

The son of music legend Bob Marley and a female supergroup will headline the acclaimed Africa Oyé Festival this summer.

The powerful and creative force of Les Amazones d’Afrique will close proceedings on Saturday 22nd June, whilst Julian Marley, fresh off his Grammy win for Best Reggae Album earlier this month, tops the bill on Sunday with his band, The Uprising.

The country’s biggest celebration of African and Caribbean music and culture is returning to Liverpool’s Sefton Park in 2024 following record breaking attendances last year. The free festival will take over one of the city’s most picturesque green spaces for two packed days of live music, dance, workshops, DJ stages, food stalls, traders and more.

Born in London in 1975, Julian Marley is the son of reggae legend Bob Marley and Barbados-born Lucy Pounder. Growing up as a youth in a musical atmosphere, the Grammy Award winning musician, singer-songwriter, producer and humanitarian quickly adopted a musical lifestyle, and at an early age and became a skillful, self-taught musician mastering the bass, drums, guitar and keyboards.

In 2005, along with the Marley family, Julian embarked on a series of ‘Africa Unite’ performances which began in Ethiopia and included Ghana in 2006 and Jamaica in 2008. At the invitation of the Jamaican government, Julian Marley and The Uprising performed during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, and celebrated along-side Jamaica’s Gold medal-winning runner, Usain Bolt.

Julian Marley ranks higher in the consciousness movement of music than most reggae artists recognised today. In the same tradition as his father, Julian is a devout Rastafarian whose music is inspired by life and spirituality.

Les Amazones d’Afrique – originally booked to play the festival in 2020 before the pandemic led to cancellations of events across the country – is a creative force that embraces international voices; sweet, strong harmonies that summon the rights of women and girls; and a meltdown of heritage and new talent. They were formed in Bamako, Mali, in 2014 by three renowned Malian music stars and social change activists, Mamani Keïta, Oumou Sangaré (who headlined Africa Oyé in 2022) and Mariam Doumbia, and the collective has since expanded to involve many female artists from across Africa and the diaspora, including Angélique Kidjo, Nneka and rising Malian star Rokia Koné.

While their cause — campaigning for gender equality and eradicating ancestral violence — is worthy enough in itself, their musical creative expression is equally powerful. Richly melodic and  far-ranging, it blends pan-African styles and collaborative harmonies with gritty, contemporary pop.

The band have previously cracked The Guardian’s Top 50 albums of 2017, NPR Music’s best albums of 2020, and featured on Barrack Obama’s playlist. They have performed on Glastonbury Festival’s Pyramid stage and featured on flagship BBC music show Later… with Jools Holland.

Africa Oyé Festival
22nd & 23rd June 2024
Sefton Park, Liverpool
FREE ENTRY

This February, The Reader will present a painting by artist and illustrator Sumuyya Khader which responds to new research into the history of the Mansion House in Liverpool’s Calderstones Park where the charity is based.

Now We Sit With It will be permanently displayed at the Mansion House from 29 February 2024 and was created as part of Making Meaning at Calderstones – The Reader’s two-year project to uncover and celebrate the unique stories of Calderstones funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund.

As part of the project, a team of researchers and a local historian set about uncovering links between the Mansion House, the surrounding park and the transatlantic slave trade. After significant research, we started to uncover a complex and nuanced picture, but no evidence was found to directly link Joseph Need Walker – for whom the Mansion House was built in 1928 – to slavery or the slave trade. However, metals, including brass, iron and lead, all of which the Walker family manufactured, were central to the operation of the trade in enslaved Africans, as goods that were used to exchange for people in West Africa.

There is evidence that Joseph Need Walker’s father and his three brothers were supportive of the abolition of the slave trade. Their father was a friend of William Wilberforce, correspondence between them beginning in 1788 still exists, with some of the letters referring to the slave trade and Wilberforce attempts to have it abolished.

Sumuyya Khader is an artist working in a multiplicity of ways with major institutions, projects, publishers, social enterprises and artist-led groups. Her practice is a combination of illustration, painting & print works that predominantly explore place and identity. Now We Sit With It will be her first work to be on permanent display.

Sumuyya Khader said: “It became really important to me to think about how we can put a Black presence into this space without depicting Blackness in a derogatory way. I wanted to find a way to honour those untold stories, names and histories that we can’t uncover because the details have been lost or the books were never written. That was all challenging, to look back at slavery and the links to this building, the family and the city and then to decide that in fact I’m not going to depict all that; that what I create will still be rooted in the research but it might not be the thing that everybody expects.”

Head of Programme at The Reader, Anna Farrell said: “Calderstones Park has been a place of meaning-making for as long as 5,000 years. This project has meant that all these years later we’ve been able to find new ways to understand and reflect on aspects of the site’s heritage that were previously underexplored. We don’t have all the answers, but we hope this beautiful piece of art will ignite peoples’ curiosities into the unique stories of Calderstones’ past.”

Katie Clark, Director of Literature at The Reader, said “As in our Shared Reading groups which take place across the UK, there is no desired response to the artwork, but we hope that everyone who visits the Mansion House will engage with it in their own way and share in a moment of contemplation. The legacy of this project will continue to shape our work through what we read and who we read with, and we are committed to sharing books that help us uncover stories and voices that often go unheard, and to ‘sitting with’ those stories together.”

This activity is made possible thanks to National Lottery players, with funds awarded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Now We Sit With It will be on display from Thursday 29 February at 5pm
The Reader, The Mansion House, Calderstones Park
Calderstones Road, Liverpool, L18 3JD

An exhibition by an artist once deemed “the wrong sex” is on display at Liverpool University’s Victoria Gallery & Museum ahead of International Women’s Day.

Abstract Thinking: Fanchon Fröhlich & Her Contemporaries explores the work of Liverpool-based artist and intellectual, Fanchon Fröhlich (1927 – 2016) alongside British abstract artists of the 20th century.

The free exhibition features 11 of her paintings and prints from The British Art and Design Association (BADA) archives, showing her strongly gestural and spontaneous abstract expressionist style. These are on display alongside other abstract artists from the University’s collection, many of whom she worked with during her career.

A prolific abstract expressionist painter, printmaker and draughtsperson throughout her life, Fanchon’s practice crossed over into a number of other disciplines including philosophy and theoretical physics. Born in the US, Fanchon moved to Liverpool in 1949 where she remained until she died in 2016.

When she passed away, she left her substantial collection of art and important biographical documents to another Liverpool-based artist, Terry Duffy who founded the charitable arts organisation BADA in 1986. Duffy continues to be instrumental in the conservation and promotion of Fanchon’s legacy as chair of BADA.

He explained that the Toxteth house, where Fanchon lived for decades, was overflowing with her life’s work. Many of the things stored in the damp basement were lost but there is still a phenomenal amount that has been saved and professionally archived, including never before seen letters, journals and papers, as well as artworks.

While the world is familiar with many of her male contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning, Fanchon has been long underappreciated because she was a woman.

He said: “Fanchon was an incredibly talented and innovative artist but was sadly overlooked in her lifetime, purely because she was a woman. She actually told me that she was once dismissed for being “the wrong sex.

“She left an extraordinary legacy of work which deserves to be recognised. This exhibition is an opportunity to introduce her work to new audiences and demonstrate the impact she had across artistic, scientific and philosophical spheres.”

Fanchon’s friendship with Duffy was a source of artistic inspiration, particularly in relation to her Collective Phenomena work. These were ‘happenings’ involving several artists (usually female) painting on the same canvas, without speaking, allowing the work to unfold subconsciously, yet with what they described as “a collective will”. These events occupied the last two decades of her life, combining her artistic fervour with her profound understanding of the unconscious mind. Examples of these collaborative abstract works can be seen in a separate, smaller gallery, along with a display that explores the printmaking aspect of her practice.

Also featured in the exhibition is one of Terry’s own works, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, which was exhibited in the 1991 John Moores Painting Prize at Walker Art Gallery. The enormous painting is displayed alongside artists such as Gillian Ayres (1930 – 2018), Sandra Blow (1925–2006), Peter Lanyon (1918–1964), William Hayter (1901 – 1988), plus other leading artists who worked in the city from the 1950s onwards.

Nicola Euston, Head of Museums and Galleries at the University of Liverpool, added: “We are delighted to showcase the work of Fanchon Fröhlich in this unique way. This is the first time her work has been seen alongside these major paintings from our own collection by a range of her contemporaries. Fröhlich’s work did not get the recognition it deserved during her lifetime and we hope this exhibition offers more context to her achievements and artistic practice.”

Abstract Thinking: Fanchon Fröhlich and her Contemporaries, is being shown until 30 March 2024, at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Ashton Street, Liverpool L69 3DR.

This February, Royal Albert Dock Liverpool is welcoming the return of Fiesta of Fire, which is back bigger and hotter than ever.

Taking place from 12-17 February to provide the ultimate half-term programme, warm up this winter with unmissable fire performances and thrilling experiences on Liverpool’s iconic waterfront.

Bringing a spectacle of fire and light to the Martin Luther King Jr. plateau, Fiesta of Fire will welcome back captivating choreographed fire shows and freestyle fire performers from Bring the Fire Project. Showing off their pyro-skills throughout the week, expect dazzling martial arts-inspired routines, flaming sword fights, and more.

New for this year, visitors will have the exciting opportunity to participate in a fire walk on Thursday 15 February. Embark on a waterfront wander like never before and brave the hot embers as the art of firewalking comes to the dock for the first time. Those looking to put their bravery to the test can experience temperatures of more than 1200°C, with only 70 spaces available on a first come first serve basis via Eventbrite.

On Valentine’s Day, the dock will be the destination for those wanting to capture magical moments with loved ones. Alongside choreographed fire shows and freestyle performers, set pulses racing in Britannia Courtyard with unique selfie spots featuring flaming hearts from 6pm-8pm.

Creating a fiery finale on Saturday 17 February, spectators can marvel at the return of the three-meter-high fire-breathing dragon from 2pm-6pm. Roaming around the dock, from the Martin Luther King Jr. Building and along Hartley Quay, enjoy a one-of-a-kind experience as the sky becomes illuminated with roaring flames. Adding to the atmosphere will be a Comic Con parade with a series of favourite superhero and TV characters, including Game of Thrones.

With a week to fill with family fun, explore Liverpool’s seafaring past at the Maritime Museum, and enjoy free, drop-in sessions that uncover the story of the Titanic. Plus, learn about the Fab Four’s journey to stardom with The Beatles Story, the world’s largest permanent exhibition devoted to Liverpool’s biggest band.

Providing the perfect place for late afternoon or early evening entertainment, enjoy an exciting lineup of free, family-friendly activities at the dock this half-term.

Visit albertdock.com/fiesta-of-fire-24 for a full timetable of events and locations.