Open Eye Gallery is proud to be a commissioned organisation for EuroFestival, which will take over Liverpool in the lead up to The Eurovision Song Contest.
Working together with Ukrainian curators Viktoria Bavykina and Max Gorbatskyi (Ukrainian.Photographies) and partner organisations in Liverpool City Region, Open Eye Gallery will produce exhibitions, publications and events in the gallery and across Liverpool city region, reflecting on the question What does home mean?
With over 40 venues, this is the largest exhibit of Ukrainian photography in the UK.
Singing Our Socks Off choir will sing welcome songs about belonging together at 6 pm. Speeches 6.30 pm.
The launch will celebrate:
- 11 new commissions by Ukrainian photographers & UK poets, creating diptychs in public spaces and on Merseyrail sites;
- 6 exhibitions featuring 20 Ukrainian photographers across 6 cultural venues;
- an app inviting people to 5 Home Trails taking you to 25 independent dwell spaces hosting a Ukrainian artwork and encouraging everyone to collect the postcard and respond with their own words;
- a book, a zine, a film, a school activity pack, a new writing competition, poetry readings, community workshops and events.
Until 2022 Aram Manukyan was happily living in Ukraine. Since the Russian invasion Aram has relocated to Birkenhead and having previously exhibited around the world, he is now showcasing his work at Arts Bar Hope Street.
For this event Aram has worked with the curator, Laura McCann to selected a collection of paintings and sketches that represent him fully as an artist. Aram is influenced by his love of colour and shape but says his greatest inspiration are the ideas that come to him instinctively.
Dialogues is a partnership between Bluecoat and Jam Factory Art Center in Lviv.
Curator Olena Kasperovych from Ukraine and Bluecoat’s Senior Curator Adam Lewis-Smythe have selected two artists to work together in their galleries to create new work, responding to each other and the context of EuroFestival.
Alevtina Kakhidze is a Ukrainian artist based in Muzychi (Kyiv Oblast), she will be working alongside Liverpool-based artist Ellie Hoskins.
Kakhidze is best known for her drawings, performances and videos. Her drawings have focused on the war against Ukraine, charting the events and impact of war on her family and neighbours. Kakhidze’s work draws out personal observations and, whilst the subject matter is often of critical importance, she uses humour as a way to understand and analyse the world around her.
As a starting point Kakhidze will develop audio work and drawings that she made in 2016 in Liverpool. These works poke fun at the eccentricities of scouse culture and often feature icons of Liverpool such as the Liverbirds and Taro Chiezo’s ubiquitous Superlambanana sculptures.
Kakhidze’s deadpan humour is shared by Ellie Hoskins who uses text, illustration, painting, sculpture and animation to comment on daily life.
Hoskins uses text to express musings on the daily lives of herself and her peer group, and often amplifies absurdities of the mundane to comic effect. Kakhidze and Hoskins will both develop new work in their galleries throughout the exhibition period and will also exhibit large poster works on the exterior of their building on Blundell Lane.
Both artists are incisive in the ways that they wryly critique the world around them. They share an understanding of how important it is to be critical, to observe and understand the world around us and to do this with a sense of mischief, fun and openness.
Free Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality digital art and Artist Talk at The Royal Standard until the 20th of May, funded by Arts Council England.
This event runs from the 18th – 20th May. When booking tickets please select the day you want to attend. On the 20th May at 2 pm there will also be an Artists’ Talk, which has limited guest space for 20 people, if you would like to attend the Artists’ Talk as well as the exhibition please be sure to select the correct booking option.
DYSPLA, with the support of Arts Council England, has curated a collection of digital artworks and VR films by world-renowned Neurodivergent Artists, showcasing a range of content intended to inspire reflection on a “new” artistic concept — the Neurodivergent Aesthetics and its Heritage. A new term used by DYSPLA since 2017 to illustrate how those who see, think and experience the world differently from the subjective norms, create unpredictable stories and tell them in nonlinear ways.
‘Torn up’ is Jason Wesley Biggs’ first exhibition.
Jason has always dabbled in art but during lockdown he was receiving so much junk mail through the door he decided to start chopping it up, this lead to him start cutting other things up; old family photos, passports, magazines, granddads’ book of Scottish tartan, he’d relish the daily takeaway menu as they’d become the sauce of artistic inspiration.
‘Torn up’ is an exhibition of chance, collage, Dada, Python, Bowie… it’s just Jason cutting, sticking, laughing, hoping and letting chance have some say and ‘by chance’ forming some composition that hopefully can evoke rather than explain.
Jason landed in Liverpool in 1996 to study Community Arts Drama at The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts… this is where he is now… on the floor… surrounded by chaos… he’ll keep cutting and sticking, head along on the 28th and say hello.
“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste” – Marcel Duchamp
Liverpool Cathedral is preparing to welcome a poignant new art installation, which depicts the one-way journey of escape that has been taken by many Ukrainians since the full-scale Russian invasion began.
Izyum to Liverpool by Ukrainian artist, Katya Buchatska, opens on 28 April and is free to experience until 19 May.
In her first UK exhibition, Buchatska delivers a heart-wrenching reminder of why the Eurovision Song Contest is being held in Liverpool instead of Ukraine. Commissioned as part of the EuroFestival cultural programme, which runs from 1-14 May in the build up to the Eurovision Song Contest, Izyum to Liverpool takes visitors on a captivating journey through the current Ukrainian landscape.
Filmed in real-time on a 24 hour rail journey from Izyum in Eastern Ukraine to the border with Poland, the multi-channel video installation gives visitors a sense of travelling on a train carriage out of Ukraine.
Photo Credit: Gareth Jones Photography.
Curator Laura McCann brings together four visual artists inspired by nature to mark Earth Day.
Lena and the Sea creates works influenced by her passion for wild swimming. Artist and qualified Zoologist, Suzanne Grace, presents large bold portraits of endangered species.
Andreea Mate will display images of small wildlife that represent personal experiences and Steph Aldwinckle will showcase abstracts informed by the views around her coastal studio on the Wirral Peninsula. Original art and prints will be for sale during the event.
Liverpool artist Vincent Lavell has an Open Studio event on Easter Saturday, 8th of April at the Northern Lights Building, Cains Brewery.
Vincent Lavell was born in Liverpool in 1960. He studied painting at Liverpool Polytechnic and at the Metropolitan University Manchester. He has worked in a variety of educational contexts including universities, prisons and hospitals.
The artist has also exhibited his work widely and has a painting in the national collection (Williamson Art Gallery and Museum).
Paintings: Southern Nights Southern Lights
Held: Hub Studios, 1-4pm.
Unit 5, Mann Street, Liverpool, L8 5AF
Free parking on Jamaica Street, paid parking outside studio.
Transport yourself into the heart of the Acid House movement in this euphoric and interactive virtual reality adventure.
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats by award-winning immersive artist Darren Emerson will take you on a multi-sensory joyride into the past. Grab your friends and go in search of an illegal rave set over one night in Coventry in 1989. The virtual reality experience brings to life the stories of promoters, police officers, and rave-goers, whose rivalries and relationships drove a working class revolution in music and society.
From poster-strewn bedrooms and pirate radio stations to a police headquarters and empty warehouse events, you’ll step into the shoes of rave culture pioneers as you witness this social phenomenon first-hand. Feel the anticipation, trepidation, excitement, and euphoria that was Acid House through an explorable virtual world and multi-sensory simulation.
Book your ticket back to 1989 to share in an experience that shaped a generation.
Following the VR experience, don’t miss a small exhibition containing archive and other audio-visual materials exploring Liverpool’s Acid House scene to enjoy at your leisure. From Liverpool’s infamous all-nighters at Quadrant Park to the rise of Cream as a super club and global brand.
This immersive experience is presented by FACT in celebration of Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool.
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats was originally commissioned and presented as part of Coventry UK City of Culture 2021. Supported by the BFI Film Fund, awarding National Lottery Funding.
*** When booking, please select either a WALKING or STATIC experience.***
Whether you are walking, seated or standing, each attendee will have access to the same virtual experience and virtual space. The WALKING experience allows audiences to move physically around the virtual environments within a large play space. The STATIC experience provides the audience member with a smaller fixed space where you can sit, stand and rave whilst you using controllers to move you within the larger virtual environments.
This experience lasts 45-60 mins and runs once every hour.
TReasured is a collaborative online artwork inspired by Mandy Romero’s personal archive accumulated over 35 years.
An anthology of short films, original writing, and photography will link together with collected ephemera from her numerous productions, projects and memories to create an interactive poetry of transgender.
Created with artists; web designers, film maker, an archivist and a literary mentor, this ever growing encyclopedia will inspire new performances.
Official Launch: The site will be launched on Transgender Day Of Visibility (TDoV), April 1st 2023 with a launch event at Liverpool Museum. Other significant dates + performances TBA.
