Exhibition Research Lab

Shiraz Bayjoo . Joy Gregory. Yvon Ngassam . Jean David Nkot . Boris Nzebo . Freya Tewelde

Exhibition Research Lab (ERL) is delighted to announce What the Mountain Has Seen, an exhibition curated by Dr Christine Eyene, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool.

Building on new research into the memory of the land, botanical histories, and colonial legacies connecting Liverpool and Lolodorf (Cameroon), this project brings together archive material and contemporary artworks by British and Cameroonian artists.

The display retraces the presence of American missionaries who travelled to Cameroon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on ships from the Liverpool-based African Steamship Company that became part of Elder Dempster. It also relates some of the practices of forced labour imposed by colonial administrators that resulted in various forms of vegetal, mineral, animal, and cultural extractions that benefitted Germany, France, the United States, Great Britain, and the city of Liverpool.

Exploring the impact of these histories in Cameroon today, Yvon Ngassam’s film Lolodorf: A Colonial Story (2022) weaves together oral history, myths, facts, and collective memory through voices of elders and youth from the rural town of Lolodorf. A selection from the installation Le chemin de fer (Underground Railroad) (2023) by Jean David Nkot associates the experience of forced labour in Cameroon with that of enslaved Africans working in cotton fields in America. The installation is centred on the emancipatory figure of Harriet Tubman and the Berlin Conference (1884-85) during which European colonial powers appropriated parts of the African continent. Ville Surprise (2010-11) by Boris Nzebo is a series of mixed media collages depicting human and plant resilience in the context of urbanisation in Cameroon’s economic capital, Douala.

Expanding on these narratives, Joy Gregory’s Invisible Life Force of Plants (2020) is a collection of cyanotype prints based on the artist’s research into Britain’s economic botany in the 17th-19th centuries against the backdrop of the transatlantic trade. Commissioned in 2023 with support from the British Council, Shiraz Bayjoo’s fabric-based installation Pu Travers Sa Dilo (2023) (‘To cross this water’, in Mauritian Creole) combines illustrations of European expeditions to East Africa, the swell of Indian Ocean, maroon forests, and indigenous trees. Paintings by Freya Tewelde from her Roots of Resonance: The Baobab Tree Project (2022-23) depict the deep connection between the baobab tree, cowhide, sound and vibration in the myth of the Abyssinian Negarit drum.

The title of the exhibition refers to the figure of Mount Mbanga – a natural landmark in Lolodorf, both present in colonial images and contemporary works – as a witness to the history of the land and its people across time. The research developed by Dr Eyene is unique in that it draws from histories and living memories of her family’s ancestral village in Cameroon to unveil overlooked chapters of Britain’s colonial history.

What the Mountain Has Seen is the research exhibition behind The Plant that Stowed Away, a display tracing the battle between nature and industrialisation in Liverpool and beyond, presenting works from Tate collections at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North from 6 February to 11 May 2025.

This exhibition is supported by IAT – The Institute of Art and Technology, Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University, and marks the Liverpool School of Art and Design’s Bicentenary.

What the Mountain Has Seen

Shiraz Bayjoo . Joy Gregory. Yvon Ngassam . Jean David Nkot . Boris Nzebo . Freya Tewelde

Until 31 October 2025

Exhibition Research Lab
John Lennon Art and Design Building
Duckinfield Street
Liverpool
L3 5RD

For more information, contact info@exhbition-research-lab.co.uk

Image: Yvon Ngassam, View of Mount Mbanga. Bikoka, Lolodorf, 2021.

Courtesy the Artist and Bikoka Art Project.

October 3, 2024 – January 31, 2025
Quiet Preview* October 3, 5:00 – 6:00pm
Public Preview October 3, 6:00 – 8:00pm

The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm.

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Exhibition Research Lab is delighted to present the first UK solo exhibition of artist and researcher OFRI CNAANI: The CONTACTLESS CONDITION, curated by Or Tshuva.

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Ofri Cnaani is an artist, educator, and researcher working across performance and media. Her art and writings explore connections between data and coloniality, somatic knowledge in the age of network spatiality, and performance as a critical technology practice. The CONTACTLESS CONDITION features four of her most recent projects created since 2020, spanning video, sound, and photographic installations, alongside a rich public programme of talks and performative workshops.

At the heart of the exhibition is Leaking Lands, a monumental three-channel video installation created as part of the artist’s recently completed PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. The video recounts the story of a devastating fire that destroyed two centuries’ worth of treasures in Brazil’s National Museum, leaving almost no physical or digital trace of its building and collection. The only way to now “visit” the museum is through digital remains, such as a photo collection contributed by WikiCommons users and a Google virtual tour. These digital fragments are used to perform a ‘digital séance,’ negotiating new sites of techno-political struggles.

Another key work, Ground Control: When The Horizon Becomes A Frontier, is a video created in collaboration with astronaut Eytan Stibbe during his time at the International Space Station (ISS). This work offers a different type of virtual tour to a place one cannot visit – space. It reflects on the politics of representing the ‘new space,’ a rapidly developing techno-political arena undergoing accelerated privatisation turning it from a distant horizon, into a new technological and economic frontier. Additional works include photographic and sound installations, all of which jointly explore human-machine-space relations while raising questions of access, power, and tangibility.

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Ofri Cnaani’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum, PS1 MoMA, Tate Britain, Venice Architecture Biennale, BMW Guggenheim Lab, Amos Rex Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, and Kiasma Museum, among others. She holds a PhD from the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also served as an associate lecturer. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Visual Culture, TU Wien, and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), studying the ‘Networked Image.’

Or Tshuva is a Manchester based curator, writer, and educator. Her curatorial projects were exhibited at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, Jerusalem Design Week, Artport Tel Aviv, Beit Hagefen: Arab-Jewish Cultural Centre, and more. She was involved in curatorial and research residencies at the MuCEM (Marseille, FR), Liverpool Biennial (UK), and Residency Unlimited (Brooklyn, NY).

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*Please note, our events and projects are always open to all. However, our Quiet Preview is for visitors of all ages who require reduced volume and reduced numbers of other visitors compared to our Public Preview. As such, we may stagger entry for visitors to ensure the gallery doesn’t become too crowded at any given time.

If you have any other access requirements, then please contact us and we will do our best to facilitate them.

February 29 – March 29, 2024
Public Preview: February 29, 4:00 – 6:00pm

The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm — INTO THE LIGHT is a tribute to the artist Jamie MacGregor Reid (1947 – 2023) containing artworks from his personal archive, the counterculture archives acquired by Prof. Colin Fallows for the LJMU Special Collections and Archives, and private collections. The exhibition was planned in the last year of Reid’s life and takes place as a memorial celebration of the artist’s work.British artist, Jamie Reid, was a romantic, rebel, iconoclast, anarchist and lover of nature. Reid is known internationally as the art director and graphic designer of the Sex Pistols, creating the internationally impactful DIY aesthetic of punk – an immediately recognisable attitude and style that resonates across the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition aims to explore important stages of this influential artist’s work and includes rare and previously unseen works, artefacts, video and documentation.The exhibition features a selection of drawings, paintings, posters, banners, videos, and publications including Reid’s seminal early-1970s Suburban Press, to his work with the Sex Pistols, and onwards to the 1980s and 1990s with various socio-political campaigns. In addition to his earlier work with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, this exhibition features documentation of Reid’s collaborative work with fashion houses including Comme des Garçons and Valentino. The natural world was an ever-present passion for Reid and his limited edition boxed loose-leaf book, Eight-fold Year (2015), together with documentation of his final large-scale land-art piece at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in St. Austell, Cornwall, are exhibited here for the first time.Forever a freethinker, ready with a contrary thought-provoking opinion and always moving forward, Reid was a visiting part-time lecturer at the Liverpool School of Art working with printed textile design students in the mid-1980s. He subsequently became a patron and integral member of the community enterprise, the Florence Institute in Liverpool.Artists, designers and stylists continue to be fascinated and influenced by Reid and his work. When representatives of the Italian fashion company, Valentino, came to visit him at The Florrie, they discovered something kind and humane within his work. It was in his human warmth and compassion where Jamie Reid’s greatest strengths as an artist became increasingly visible, and one of his main concerns was to encourage others to fulfil their potential and move forward – as he would say, INTO THE LIGHT!—Curator: Prof. Colin FallowsCuratorial Assistant: Anna Jane HoughtonOrganised with the collaboration of John Marchant Gallery and Arcova Trust.

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Thanks:
David Alker, Richard Boote, Lee Browne, John J. Campbell, Margi Clarke, Anne Foulkes, Malcolm Garrett, Martin Gee, Graham Gildea, Mike Hatjoullis, Maria Hughes, Carl Hunter, Andrew Ibi, Mark Jordan, Prof. Joasia Krysa, Libby Lawrie, Steve Lowe, PT Madden, John Marchant, Jacqui McAssey, Kevin McCormack, John McCready, Paula McNulty, Christopher Olive, Paul Owen, Emily Parsons, Marc Provins, Rowan Reid, Dr. Emma Roberts, Jon Savage, Milos Simpraga, Dr. James Schofield, Valerie Stevenson, Heather Thrift, Susannah Waters, Prof. Maureen Wayman, John Wilde, Ian Wroot.

Comme des Garçons, R. Jacksons & Sons, L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Valentino.— If you have any access requirements, then please contact us and we will do our best to facilitate them.

October 5 – December 1, 2023
Quiet Preview* October 5, 5:00 – 6:00pm
Public Preview October 5, 6:00 – 8:00pm

The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm

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Exhibition Research Lab presents the first UK exhibition of practice and archival material from Art Center Ongoing, Datsuijo and Tohmei Diner. Co-curated by Yang Chunting, Matthew Lawson Garrett, Catherine Harrington, Gaku Inoue, LIJINGWEN, Leo Nelki, Hibiki Mizuno, Rika Nakashima, Yu Fush Nishikawa, Nozomu Ogawa, Gabrielle Reed, Dr James Schofield, Tatsuhiko Togashi and Cleo Verstrepen.

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Tokyo is a truly global city in every sense of the word. A sprawling metropolis with what can feel like no end, it is in a constant state of flux. Not only does it shift and warp to expand its physical and conceptual spaces, it also acts as the socio-economic focal point for a nation to the outside world.

Within its borders and population of nearly 14 million there are a diverse range of creative communities that overlap, creating complex relations between disciplines and peoples. However, given the density of population, the limited number of large-scale institutions, and a commercial art market smaller than most large cities globally, how and where do the majority of practitioners exist and operate?

As is the near-universal case for creative practitioners, here self-organisation is key.

Conversations: Tokyo uses this self-organising impulse as a starting point and stages a number of conversations focused around the subject with Art Center Ongoing, Datsuijo and Tohmei Diner. Taking a variety of forms (audio, visual, conversational, performative, experiential), and with a variety of formalities, they present a window into an open and honest dialogue of the practice and existence of those collective organisations and their constituent practitioners currently active in Tokyo.

Displaying examples of practice, archival records, direct communication, and warping spatio-temporal boundaries of the physical locations of the organisations themselves, the project creates an immersive environment for learning and exchange. Through this, Conversations: Tokyo hopes to collaboratively share and generate new knowledge between geographic locations and peoples in order to develop new approaches to shared issues.

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Art Center Ongoing is a compact art complex with a gallery, library and café, which opened in January 2008 and has introduced numerous artists with the idea of “a place where ongoing experimental forms of expression can be pursued.” Since 2013, we have also been involved in an artist-in-residence programme and continued to actively build a network with the international art scene. In addition to exhibitions, we have held various events such as talks, performances, and workshops, aiming to create a place where a diverse range of people can gather around the arts.

Datsuijo (a) place to be naked wishes to bring a new perspective on art-making – stressing its intimate nature while elevating its political significance. The project space, named “Datsuijo,” serves as the base for our collective activities, seeking an intermediate sphere between the private and the public. By carrying out experimental projects within this space, we investigate the present-day dynamics between ourselves and society.

Tohmei Diner is a 7-seat diner located in Arakawa-ku, Tokyo. It is open Thursday – Monday (closed on Tuesday and Wednesday), 17:00 – 23:00, and shares its space with the gallery Lavender Opener Chair.

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Conversations is an iterative project developed as the outcome of a research residency into self-organised artistic practices hosted by Tokyo Arts and Space in Autumn 2022 by Dr James Schofield.

It seeks to provide a snapshot of self-organised practice from a given geographic location presented online / offline elsewhere in the world. It is hoped that by providing insights into different strategies employed by practitioners, groups, collectives and organisations to common global issues – driven by neoliberalism, globalisation and network culture – that it will promote exchange of skills, experience and knowledge in self-organised contexts. As the project grows and more geographic conversations take place, an online database will be created to allow it to become a peer-led, and community driven, resource.

Conversations can take any form in the most expanded sense and have any level of formality / informality, depending on the resources available when they are conducted and documented.

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*Please note, our projects and events are always open to all. However, our Quiet Preview is for visitors of all ages who require reduced volume and reduced numbers of other visitors compared to our Public Preview. As such, we may stagger entry for visitors to ensure the gallery doesn’t become too crowded at any given time.

If you have any other access requirements, then please contact us and we will do our best to facilitate them.

September 11 – 15, 2023
Quiet Preview* September 11, 2:00 – 3:00pm
Public Preview and Drinks Reception September 11, 3:00 – 5:00pm

The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm

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Exhibition Research Lab is delighted to host the first UK exhibition of work by the 2020 & 2022 winners of the John Moores Painting Prize China.

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As part of their prize, the artists have undertaken a residency programme in the studio spaces of Liverpool School of Art and Design over the summer of 2023. Some of the work on display has been created in response to their experiences in Liverpool during the residency programme, and is being shown to the public for the first time.

Their prize-winning works will be on display at the Walker Art Gallery alongside the 2023 John Moores Painting Prize UK, which runs Sep 16, 2023 – Feb 25, 2024.

The artists will be present at the public opening of the John Moores Painting Prize UK exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery on September 16 for an informal Q&A session about their work.

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Participating artists:

2020 John Moores Painting Prize China Winners
Li Qiangqiang
Li Qing
Tan Bide
Wang Longwei
Yang Wei

2022 John Moores Painting Prize China Winners
Chen Jiabin
Jin Dawei
Nie Li
Peng Yong
You Xin

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If you have any other access requirements, then please contact us and we will do our best to facilitate them.

February 17 – May 4, 2023
Quiet Preview* February 17, 5:00 – 6:00pm
Public Preview February 17, 6:00 – 8:00pm

The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm, and will be closed on industrial action strike days and during university holidays.

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Exhibition Research Lab is pleased to present the world premiere of Fanchon Frohlich: The Wrong Sex, in collaboration with the British Art and Design Association (BADA). Curated by Dr James Schofield (LJMU) with curatorial assistance from Terry Duffy (BADA).

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Fanchon Fröhlich (1927-2016), a prolific abstract expressionist painter, printmaker and draughtsperson throughout her life, her practice crossed over into a number of other disciplines including philosophy, fashion and theoretical physics. After studying The Philosophy of Science at the University of Chicago in 1944 she would emigrate to England from America in 1949, making her home in Liverpool. In her early years in England she studied Linguistics Philosophy at Oxford University, graduating in 1953, followed by a Postgraduate Scholarship at Liverpool Art College where she studied painting. From her base in the city she travelled globally, exploring new techniques and approaches to practice alongside developing many collaborations with other eminent practitioners of the time. This included abstract painter Peter Lanyon in St. Ives in the late-1950s, printmaker William Hayter at the renowned Atelier 17 in Paris in the early/mid-1960s, and calligraphic artist Goto San in Kyoto throughout the 1970s. It was during her time at Atelier 17 that her work was most prominent, leading to her writing for the internationally renowned Situationist International in 1961, and later exhibiting her prints alongside luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró.

However, against this rich and varied backdrop of practice and relationships with global pioneers in their fields, she was largely overlooked in the canon of art history. Not for reasons relating to her technical creative ability, but purely because she was deemed to be ‘the wrong sex’ for an abstract expressionist painter of the time. The Wrong Sex directly addresses this prejudiced assumption to platform Fröhlich, her practice and her life. Opening out her legacy to new audiences and disseminating the impact she had across artistic, scientific and philosophical spheres. Providing a starting point for future research, response and collaboration for practitioners and BADA.

The exhibition is the first display of the archive of Fanchon Fröhlich anywhere in the world.

Much like the artist and her own way of working, the display will be dynamic and changing throughout the lifespan of the exhibition, in order to provide as much insight into the archive as possible. Incorporating original storage items from the archive into the curation of the exhibition, many of the previously unseen items will be articulated in new, non-chronological, relations with one another to provide a fluid dialogue that encourages further interaction and study.

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A full listing of the archive can be found digitally here.

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Image: Portrait of the artist and her work, circa 1961.

Exhibition Research Lab.
November 28 – December 16, 2022.
Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm, or by appointment.

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As the nights draw in and the cold weather of Winter approaches, the ERL opens its doors to the arts communities of Liverpool and beyond, and invites them to use the space to develop plans for their own projects in 2023. Activating the space as a site of social engagement and discourse, any group, collective or organisation is invited to spend time using it to help facilitate and expand the progress of their ideas and making Arrangements.

Continuing to promote an expanded notion of curatorial and exhibitionary knowledge production, ERL staff will hold programme development meetings on-site alongside external users and their own meetings. Staff and students at the university will also have access to use the space, and provide the potential to act as sounding boards for meetings taking place at any given time. By opening out the gallery space as a practical lab to peers within Liverpool and beyond the city, the ERL hopes to share its resources with others at a time when free, safe, warm space is increasingly scarce.

Read only copies of publications and periodicals and free to take excerpts of texts will be available, alongside seating, art supplies for children, and other equipment to facilitate discussion and planning. Arrangements is underpinned by a free-to-use drop-in model, but if you would like to book specific dates and times to access the space then please contact info@exhibition-research-lab.co.uk with your preferred dates, times, and group size and we will do our best to reserve space for you.

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October 4 – November 4, 2022
Monday – Friday
11:00am – 04:00pm

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During downtime in the public programme between installation periods the ERL will be transformed into a pedagogical resource, providing freely accessible and distributed excerpts of reading material within two distinct categories: curatorial and exhibitionary knowledge, and curated reading lists relating to upcoming public programme projects. This resource will be the only one of its kind in Liverpool, which will be freely accessible to the general public.

Between physical projects in the space the iterant reading room will serve as a base for self-directed interaction with key themes in the upcoming programme, alongside broader concerns of exhibition-making. The curated reading lists will be compiled by staff, researchers and invited practitioners either participating in, or responding to, the upcoming programme and current discourses within contemporary art.

From this dynamic library space public events and reading groups will be organised both online/offline; allowing the ERL to continue fulfilling its remit of knowledge production and dissemination, developing regional, national and international relationships, and providing critically engaged outreach to the local arts community.

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The texts and items selected for this installation by Liverpool ESEA Network aim to decolonise gallery spaces by representing East and South East Asian (ESEA) arts and culture in a genuine way. They largely focus on the ESEA experience in the UK; however, some texts reference the Asian American experience which has strong parallels. In both countries, this demographic faces many of the same institutional issues surrounding assimilation, stereotypes and being overlooked as a community. The items that accompany the texts also belong to the members of Liverpool ESEA Network – here, the act of selecting pieces that belong to people of ESEA heritage is a step forward in decolonising gallery spaces by reappropriating the white gaze, and visually extends the reach of the texts. Liverpool ESEA Network is focused on the key importance of authentic ESEA representation in the arts, and wider society, as this community’s intersectional experiences are often misrepresented or disregarded.

Curated by Dan Chan, with text suggestions and loan of items contributed by Emily Beswick, Michelle Houlston, Mun Carmen Lee and Vera Chok.

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October 4 – November 4, 2022
Monday – Friday
11:00am – 04:00pm

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This presentation of texts serves as an invitation into the ideas, writing and research that has informed the development of PINK: a peripatetic curatorial project focusing on interdisciplinary research, practice and collaborative exchange. PINK was established as a means of reflecting upon performative modes of exhibition-making and collective acts of thinking and making. PINK occupies an experimental research-led position, weaving between artistic research and discursive curatorial approaches – initiating methods for the production of knowledge that engages with a particular set of curatorial questions and ideas.

Curated by Katy Morrison, this constellation of texts attempts to frame an approach to curatorial research and its practice – encompassing the broad, varying avenues of PINK that are multimodal, multi-temporal and multi-situated. Each revealing and unfolding PINK’s different ongoing lines of enquiry.

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July 7 – July 16, 2022.
(Closed on Sunday, July 10.)

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Liverpool Arab Arts Festival presents this collaborative exhibition by the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) and the Beirut Printmaking Studio, hosted by the Exhibition Research Lab.

Impressions from an Archive brings printmakers from the recently created analogue printmaking studio into dialogue with the photographic collection of the 25-year-old Arab Image Foundation. How might each printmaker “translate” their chosen photograph through their individual printmaking practice?

The Arab Image Foundation’s work is an ever-evolving research process into ways of looking at, interpreting, and interacting with the photographic objects in its custody. A photographic negative or print, once created, remains in constant physical mutation. Likewise, its historical, cultural, and affective lives will depend on the viewer and will continue to shift. Through its work, the AIF studies the material and immaterial layers of photographs and seeks to further enrich this layering.

For this exhibition, printmakers from the Beirut Printmaking Studio chose images from diverse AIF collections, spanning from the 1870s to the 1970s, and from different parts of the Arab region and its diaspora, from which to produce their own intaglio prints. Positive prints of the original photographic negatives have been produced, each of which is displayed alongside the corresponding intaglio print as a diptych.

This exhibition reminds us how archives can support the objects they contain in their continuous evolutions, across social, artistic, cultural, and geopolitical currents. In this way, archiving becomes an act of collective and plural translation, in which different realities and perspectives can co-exist, breathing new life into photographic objects.

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The Arab Image Foundation is an independent association forging new pathways for photography and image practices. Its collection of over 500,000 photographic objects and documents from and related to the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora has been gradually assembled over the last 25 years by artists and researchers and through donations. With a critical and innovative approach, it collects, rethinks, preserves, activates and understands these photographs through their multiple strata, and enriches the collection in the process.

Beirut Printmaking Studio is an inclusive and open space for people from all walks of life interested in discovering, learning and practicing art. It is the only open printmaking studio in Lebanon that covers all forms of analogue printmaking, including intaglio, lithography, relief, alternative processes and darkroom photography. The studio aims at promoting and establishing analogue techniques in Lebanon, especially printmaking techniques.

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Impressions from an Archive is part of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2022 programme, hosted at the ERL as part of a new relationship between the organisations.

Founded in 1998, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (LAAF) is the UK’s longest-running annual Arab arts and culture festival, platforming the best UK and international Arab artists on a yearly basis. The festival creates a dynamic between traditional and contemporary Arab artforms, encouraging informed debate that explores, and increases, appreciation of Arab people and their rich cultures.

More information about the festival, and the work it undertakes throughout the year can be found here.

July 7 – July 16, 2022.
(Closed on Sunday, July 10.)

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Father Tongue is a newly commissioned video work by artist and curator Hannaa Hamdache, hosted by the Exhibition Research Lab. The work speaks of what it means to sit in between two cultures through the use of language. It presents an alternative example of what it looks like to be the confluence of two cultures: to be mixed-heritage.

This moving image piece uses the spoken word to address the artist’s own personal experience of being British and Algerian. The English language (her mother tongue) is used to explore these ideas, but it is in Arabic (her father tongue) that these words are shared.

The words are performed by the artist – it is her mouth that we see moving – but it is the voice of another that can be heard. A translator speaks the words in a language that the artist cannot.

Father Tongue plays with the feeling of something missing, with the inadequacy and shame felt for not being able to perform one’s identity as expected: to have had a linguistic inheritance stripped away by colonial tongues. Father Tongue investigates the consequences of when integration is prioritised over preservation, yet simultaneously celebrates the joy and defiance that comes from being born of two cultures.

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Hannaa Hamdache is an artist and curator of mixed English and Algerian heritage. Based in Nottingham, UK, she holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and Art History from Kingston University London and an MLitt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) from the Glasgow School of Art. She works to make the arts open for all through the use of humour and education. Her practice explores the idea of play: playing with context, the exhibition and the everyday.

Currently, she is investigating her own personal context and heritage through family archival photographs. She is part of Lumina Collective based at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham and a member of the Creative Thinktank at UK New Artists.

Hamdache has delivered curatorial projects working with Glasgow City Council and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow; Somerset House and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; and Soho House Museum in Birmingham.

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Father Tongue is part of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival 2022 programme, hosted at the ERL as part of a new relationship between the organisations.

More information about the festival, and the work it undertakes throughout the year can be found here.

April 28 – May 13, 2022.
Preview April 28, 5:00 – 6:30pm.

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Extended dates:

May 27 – May 31, 2022.
Preview May 26, 6:00 – 8:00pm.
(Please note – the gallery will be open on Saturday, but not Sunday.)

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Animate Assembly (w/ Caroline Sebilleau & Antonio Roberts), Anna Barham, Jonathan Basile, Joe Devlin, David Gauthier, Sumuyya Khader, INTER–MISSION & formAxioms, Rosa Menkman, Katie Paterson, Post-Digital Publishing Archive (Silvio Lorusso), Tom Schofield, Erica Scourti, and Mark Simmonds.

Curated by Torque Editions.

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BiblioTech explores the changing role of the library, reading, writing, and publishing in a post-digital age. The title suggests the latin term for library, ‘bibliotheca’, and also alludes to how the library and book culture has become increasingly technologised.

The exhibition asks: What is the library-as-institution in the context of advanced AI language tools, new forms of text and image processing, and the increasing spread of publishing technology into our lives? How might the library evolve within the next phases of digitisation entangled with issues of climate change, mental health, social justice, and automation? And how will print culture respond to these changes too?

This exhibition also takes place at NeMe in Cyprus, running in both locations simultaneously for a period. The majority of works are presented in both locations, while some one-off works are exhibited in only one site. Accordingly, this crossover and correspondence creates a context to explore modes of reproducibility, presence and difference at play in print and digital-based artefacts, the library, and culture more broadly.

By transforming the gallery into a library, composed of diverse publishing, reading, writing and learning practices, as reinvented by contemporary artists, BiblioTech seeks to playfully push against audience expectations for gallery and library alike. More broadly, the exhibition explores how libraries have become hybridised with other environments: from museums and schools, to bedrooms, computer-networks, labs and forests, opening up new conceptual space for the future of books; of how and where they are accessed, written and read.

Curated by Torque Editions (Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner) the exhibition also presents books published by Torque, a number of artworks they have produced (in collaboration with Tom Schofield) focused on machine learning and language, a selection of material from LJMU’s Stafford Beer archive, and a curated list of shadow libraries.

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A symposium exploring projects within, and broader contexts to, the show will take place on May 5, 3:00 – 6:30pm. Featuring Joana Chicau, Johanna Drucker, Gary Hall, Mel Jordan, Esther Leslie, Edgar Schmitz, and Emily Segal.

More information about the symposium can be found here.

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This project is supported by Arts Council England, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and Liverpool School of Art and Design.

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*Image still from: Katie Paterson, ‘Future Library: A Century Unfolds’, 2019.

[Online]

The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine is an in enquiry into the relationship between curating and artificial intelligence, and a possibility of developing an experimental system capable of curating, based on human-machine learning principles. Unfolding as a series of machine learning experiments, the project is a collaboration between artists UBERMORGEN, digital humanist Leonardo Impett, and curator Joasia Krysa.

The first online experiment will be launched at Liverpool Biennial 2021 and is co-commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and the Whitney Museum of American Art for its online gallery space artport.

More information about the project can be found here.

November 20, 2019 – January 5, 2020.
Preview November 19, 5:00 – 6:30pm, including the artists in conversation.

Recurrent Queer Imaginaries is an exhibition of queer manifestos, motto writing and urban dreaming. It features the new artificial intelligence entity from Helen Pritchard and Winnie Soon, the “Motto Assistant”.

“Motto Assistant” is a machine learner, who continuously writes mottos for revolutions, anti-fascist guiding principles of living, queer love ethics, authoritarian resistances, political movements, class struggles, municipal identities, city planning, art practices, joyful engagements and violent direct action.”Motto Assistant” applies the mottos, as a method of questioning, revising, imagining and developing in light of historical circumstances and cultural conditions. Incoherent and worm-eaten, Soon and Pritchard invite the audience to interpret a motto from “Motto Assistant” as a guiding principle of how to reorganise your collective life and fight injustices in the present.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the histories and uses of manifestos and mottos as operational instructions/guidance for living together and organising urban space. In particular Recurrent Queer Imaginaries explores how queer and feminist manifestos have been used to propose imaginaries for life in cities that “could be” or “could have been.” The artwork explores that when these manifestos, these words, are read together they might, as Ursula K Le Guin speculates, “activate our imaginations” to rewrite living.

The artwork was developed using manifestos and zines (the earliest written in 1971) for queer and intersectional life as source text for machine learning and generative processes. It uses recurrent neural networks to train and process sequences of collective voices, as well as the diastic algorithm to establish a poetic structure. Such a queer model opens up new imaginaries and forgotten language beyond the confines of accurate prediction and effective generalisation.

As part of their process the artists took on some practices of urban dreaming, seeking out manifestos that are housed in the radical books shops and libraries in Kings Cross and Euston, places historically important for the queer movement. Although sites of historic significance for queer spaces, Kings Cross and Euston are both areas that have been effected significantly by the construction and changing urban fabric of London: queer night-time spaces have been replaced by the relentless gentrification by tech companies and start-ups.

The seed text Not for Self, but for All is used in different parts of the text generation. This seed text, which at first was mistaken for a corporate slogan, is Camden Council’s motto for their municipal identity which hangs prominently next to the Google offices in the heart of the new development of Kings Cross. Recurrent Queer Imaginaries is a call to reclaim queer spaces from corporate neocolonial imaginations, operational injustices and reimagine them differently for all, as a commitment to queer liberation.

Now start your motto.

Helen Pritchard (UK) and Winnie Soon (HK/DK) have collaborated since 2009, on machine reading/writing, operative processes, software critique and the ways computational practices parse queer life. Helen is the Head of Digital Arts Computing, and a lecturer in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and Winnie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Digital Design at Aarhus University.

Supported by Aarhus University, Goldsmiths, University of London, Goldsmiths Digital Studios and Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Art and Design.

As part of Liverpool Biennial 2018 (July – October 2018) Paul Elliman presents Vauxhall Astra 2020 (2018), the forthcoming and newest model of a car available since 1979 when General Motors launched the Vauxhall/Opel Astra, now the only car produced at Ellesmere Port. Vauxhall Astra 2020 is offered as a constellation of raw materials, half-a-dozen boulders and rock-like lumps of the car’s constituent parts at original scale, made of steel (iron ore), glass, plastic, aluminium, rubber and electrical components.

Paul Elliman (b. 1961, London, UK) lives and works in London. His work follows language through many of its social and technological guises, in which typography, human voice and bodily gestures emerge as part of a direct correspondence with other visible forms and sounds of the city. Elliman is a visiting tutor for the MFA Voice Studies programme at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. He has exhibited widely in venues such as the ICA, London, UK (2014); New Museum, New York, USA (2008); Tate Modern, London, UK (2001); and MoMA, New York, USA (2012) with recent solo exhibitions at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2017); and La Salle de Bains, Lyon, France (2017).

The Serving Library – in residence.

April 1, 2017 – October 30, 2018.

The Serving Library is an artist-run non-profit organisation founded in 2011 to develop a shared toolkit for artist-centred education and discourse through related activities of publishing and collecting. It comprises a biannual journal (Bulletins of The Serving Library) published both online and in print, an archive of framed objects on permanent display, and a public programme of workshops and events. During The Serving Library’s residency at ERL, the gallery space serves as a satellite seminar room to host occasional classes for university-level art, design, and writing students from schools across the world, as well as a regular series of public talks and exhibitions building upon the library’s archival material.

The Serving Library maintains a collection of framed objects, each the source of an illustration that has appeared on the pages of its house journal Bulletins of The Serving Library or its predecessor Dot Dot Dot. The collection includes items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a ouija board. Together these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to be drawn into our programs, essentially serving as a toolbox for teaching.

As part of Liverpool Biennial 2016 (July – October 2016), Suzanne Treister’s HFT The Gardener is exhibited for the first time in the UK by Exhibition Research Lab (ERL). Comprising 174 works, the exhibition features artworks created by the fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg, a banker turned ‘outsider artist’.

Traumberg is an algorithmic high-frequency trader (HFT), who experiments with psychoactive drugs and explores the ethno-pharmacology of over 100 psychoactive plants. He uses gematria (Hebrew numerology) to discover the numerological codes in the plants’ botanical names, finding their equivalents with companies in the FT Global 500 Financial Index.

Traumberg communes with the traditional shamanic users of these plants, whose practices include healing, divining the future, entering the spirit world, and exploring the hallucinatory nature of reality. He develops a fantasy of himself as a techno-shaman, transmuting the spiritual dimensions of the universe and the hallucinogenic nature of capital into new art forms. Ultimately, he becomes an ‘outsider’ artist whose work is collected by oligarchs, bankers and museums. Unaffected by worldly success he continues his parapsychopharmacological research, working on a new algorithm to discover the true nature and location of consciousness and to determine whether psychoactive drugs open a portal to the holographic universe.

A series of investigations and events developed by Joasia Krysa and Lars Bang Larsen.

Inspired by the brief lessons of Carlo Rovelli; the theories of Karen Barad; the paintings of Hilma af Klint; how the hippies saved physics and the scientific return of ether as cosmic honey; and the art, poetry and particle physics of Ken McMullin, John Berger and Michael Doser.*

In search for answers to fundamental questions about the more-than-human history of the cosmos, particle physics has scrutinised the world at the quantum scale, altering what we know and revealing the extent of our unknowing. It is now accepted by science that at the scale of particles—these elementary ingredients that act like bricks in a gigantic Lego set and with which the entire material reality surrounding us is constructed, as Rovelli puts it—matter and energy behave very differently from the everyday reality that we see. The quantum world is one that has its own materiality, between the real and imaginary, measurable and immeasurable, visible and invisible, all at the same time. As Karen Barad writes, Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the “Other.”

The project investigates what constitutes reality at various scales and dimensions, engaging with ideas of particle physics and art as a set of entangled concepts. It develops as a series of research investigations and propositions articulated through public presentations, exhibitions and other formats, to address fundamental questions and to imagine what has not yet been known.

The series begins with Prologue: Spectral Exchange taking place at Exhibition Research Lab December 17, 2018 – February 1, 2019. Videos by artists Matthew C. Wilson and Jol Thomson will seed an evolving exhibition. Wilson’s Field Notes tracks shifting spatial, temporal, and theoretical horizons from marine navigation to quantum optics. Thomson’s G24|0vßß audio-visual composition approaches the coldest piece of matter in the universe—the CUORE experiment, National Laboratory of Gran Sasso, Italy —sinking out of the observable cosmos via temperature into a radical outside. Thomson dreamed a composition into that space, iteratively extending horizons of thought, scale and agency.

The project is supported by Arts Council England and Liverpool School of Art and Design.

*References: Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2017); Reality is Not What it Seems (2017); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007); Ken McMullin (with John Berger and Michael Doser), Art, Poetry and Particle Physics (2004); Hilma Af Klint’s impure abstraction, David Kaiser’s How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2012), and the Higgs boson.

February – March 2019.

Curated by Hana Leaper.

This research and archival-based exhibition brings material from the first decade of the John Moores Painting Prize together with records from other important cultural events and movements that soon followed in Liverpool during the sixties. It identifies the points of origin for the rise of a local youth culture that became a global phenomenon.

In 1957, local businessman John Moores collaborated with the Walker Art Gallery to start a biennial painting prize. His aim was to regenerate the region’s arts in the aftermath of the Second World War, and for the exhibition to ‘act as a focus for cultural life on Merseyside’.

As the photographs and archival materials from the Walker Art Gallery show, the John Moores Painting Prize attracted the very best of British artistic talent. Kevin Donovan’s slideshow demonstrates how local school children and aspiring artists were inspired by visits to the Prize, and images of student work show that the Liverpool School of Art was thriving. The vibrant interplay of art, music, fashion, theatre and poetry around our city created a hothouse of radical culture. Figures like Adrian Henri and John Lennon connected these scenes and went on to promote them worldwide.

This exhibition celebrates John Moores’ bold vision for Liverpool’s future, and demonstrates how his investment in the cultural life of the city took hold, helping propel it to international fame. His name and the cultural legacy of the Prize continue to have an impact on the life of Liverpool Art School, which is now part of John Moores Liverpool University.

December 17, 2018 – February 1, 2019.

A series of investigations and events developed by Joasia Krysa and Lars Bang Larsen. Prologue: Spectral Exchange featuring Matthew C. Wilson and Jol Thomson.

Matthew C. Wilson and Jol Thomson use transdisciplinary artistic research to engage with other modes of practice, notably scientific research and field work, in a negotiation of the limits of knowledge. For this exhibition they approach the gallery as an experimental platform for open-ended exchange: a zone receiving generative materials, formed, reformed—later studied and analysed. The artists’ exhibition-as-conversation, and conversation-as-research, critically engages notions of measurement, im/perceptibility, horizons, anomalies, constants, in/determinacy, opticality, as well as locations and structures of knowledge.

Wilson and Thomson’s ongoing exchange materialises in various forms, from field samples to text and image, inviting further lines of inquiry surrounding past and ongoing projects by the artists. A video from each artist initiates the exhibition:

Wilson’s Field Notes: The Age of Measurement (2018) tracks shifting spatial, temporal, and mental horizons. The desire to ingress into unfamiliar domains, from the geographic to the theoretical, courses through historical maritime navigation instruments through to present-day scientific apparatuses.

Thomson’s G24|0vßß (2016) audio-visual composition approaches the coldest piece of matter in the universe, which attempts to answer, by way of physics, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The CUORE experiment, at the National Laboratory of Gran Sasso, Italy, sinks out of the observable cosmos via temperature. Thomson dreamed a composition into that radical outside, iteratively extending horizons of thought, scale and agency. Quotes from Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice (1968) punctuate the composition.