Exhibitions
Creative TouristSpring has sprung a wealth of great exhibitions in the North West, from intimate photographic shows to huge installations.
Questions of control, identity and observation surface in all of our picks this month, beginning with Ai Weiwei’s 24-hour performance, Sewing a Button. Here, a single room becomes the site of vast political forces, as the artist re-enacts his 81-day detention by Public Security in China.
That uneasy sense of being watched mutates in FACT’s Rachel Maclean: They’ve Got Your Eyes, a theatrical AI-driven hall of mirrors probing the technologies that are watching, learning, and quietly getting better at being us. Just next door Only Slime: Afterlife pushes further at the same AI theme, dropping you inside a shifting digital system where agency flickers between player, avatar and creator.
Elsewhere, questions of selfhood take more tactile forms. My Hat and My Other Hat transforms Stockport’s hatting legacy into a space of role-play, where identity is worn, performed and unsettled. Black Country Type II finds it embedded in place itself, as Tom Hicks captures the typography, humour and endurance of a changing post-industrial landscape. And at Victoria Baths, Helios expands the frame entirely – a reminder of the vast astronomical systems that quietly dwarf the ones we build ourselves.
