Event type: Exhibition

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.

‘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