Month: July 2022

‘Do They Owe Us A Living?’ @AoMO2022

On By JennaIn Liverpool 2022Leave a comment

The Royal Standard

Northern Lights,

Cains Brewery Village,

5 Mann Street,

Liverpool,

L8 5AF

 

Private View: Wednesday August 17th 18:00 – 21:00

August 18th – September 25th 2022

 

Organised in collaboration with the Art of Management & Organisation conference, co-hosted by the Bluecoat and the University of Liverpool, the group exhibition Do They Owe Us A Living? Brings together twelve artists and artist collaborations and takes as its point of departure the conference theme ‘art-as-activism’. Each artist was asked to respond to the theme of activism within the broader context of the conference.

The exhibition features a diverse range of practice: from community-focused projects engaging with care in the workplace and council-approved regeneration programmes; through to artworks directed at the histories of prejudice surrounding different communities; as well as work that questions the efficacy of art to function as an act of political resistance in its vulnerability to political co-option, ‘activism’ is proposed less as a given than a complex proposition. While the Achilles’ heel of activism lies with its susceptibility to sanitisation under capitalism, and the Achilles’ heel of ‘art-as-activism’, the squaring of aesthetic questions with moral ones, what unites these artists is the way in which they seek to critique life under the market forces of neoliberalism, shedding light on the grassroots of lived experience, in the workplace and beyond, whilst throwing caution to the ‘activist’ tag.

Inspired by the 1978 song by the punk band Crass, from which it takes its name, Do They Owe Us A Living? sets out to reveal, as exhibition and idea, how any “living“ owed is registered solely with quality of life, as distinct from the ubiquitous culture of cost-benefit analysis and transactional thinking that surrounds us.

Artists: Beagles & Ramsay, Terry Bond, Dreamchord (nil00 & Yank Scally), Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Rachel Garfield, Julika Gittner, Al Hopwood, Sumuyya Khader, Manual Labours (Sophie Hope &; Jenny Richards), Chad McCail, Ian Monroe, Simon Willems

Curated by Simon Willems, artist and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Reading.

Join us for a private viewing at The Royal Standard on the 17th August at 6pm.

Frankie Armstrong – ‘Voicing Activism’ @AoMO2022

‘Voicing Activism’ Frankie Armstrong @ The Bluecoat (18th August 5.30pm)

Why is it we talk about a people, an oppressed minority, or indeed an oppressed majority (women) ‘finding their voice’?

From the suffragettes, through the anti-apartheid movement and Greenham Common and many other political movements, it is raising their voices together that has helped them both to keep in the struggle and to be heard. It may be an individual voice such as Victor Hara in Chile, or the collective voices of the children of Soweto, but it is the quality of the voice that called to Frankie. It was Pete Seeger in the 1950s that stirred Frankie into this realisation, with songs that spoke to both the head and the heart.

Since then, Frankie has been singing songs that are an expression of working people, songs from women’s lives, songs of people struggling against oppression, of daughters against tyrannical fathers (in the folk tradition), and about the environment or social inequality.

In 1975, she began running voice workshops. Her teaching is aimed at helping others find the same sense of energy and power of communication that she experienced as a solo singer. In her keynote presentation, she’ll also speak about her feeling that the beauty and power expressed through voice can engage the artistry available to all of us.

Frankie is the honorary president of the NVN (Natural Voice Network), an honorary member of VASTA (Voice and Speech Trainers Association) and received a Gold Badge from the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society) as both a singer and a voice teacher.

Frankie Armstrong will deliver a keynote speech on the 18th August 2022 at The Bluecoat at 5.30pm.

On By JennaIn Liverpool 2022Leave a comment