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 colossal Button Up! assembles industrial materials into a forensic account of empire, manufacture and control, taking Manchester as both subject and setting. 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 a neglected and abused river. And asking what it means to make – and encounter – art in times of crisis, Broken Ecologies at Castlefield Gallery offers a topical exploration of power, protest, memory and survival.
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.
