Exhibitions in the North
Creative TouristFrom monumental to minutiae. This month’s exhibitions span galleries big and small, shifting from large-scale histories of power to the finer details of how people, places and environments carry their consequences.
Newly announced at Aviva Studios, Ai Weiwei’s hugely ambitious Button Up! assembles industrial materials into a forensic account of empire, manufacture and control, taking Manchester as both subject and setting. Smaller in scale but no less conceptually ambitious, esea contemporary celebrates its 40th anniversary with Thresholds of Becoming, a group exhibition that probes ideas of transition and sees instability as a generative force.
Elsewhere, the focus shifts closer to the ground – in a literal sense in the case of the sound artwork Electric Echoes, which partly unfolds in the Stockport Air Raid Shelters and gives voice to an abused river. And asking what it means to make – and encounter – art in times of crisis, Broken Ecologies at Castlefield Gallery investigates the role of the artist against a backdrop of climate crisis, social inequality, and political unrest.
Two photography exhibitions round things off, with Leeds’ Photo North Festival #7 leaning into the medium’s capacity for social documentary, and Manchester Photography Collective’s Where We Move Together offering a collective portrait of the city through its streets and its people.
