Open Eye for Liverpool Biennial 2016
Polly Checkland Harding
The only gallery dedicated to photography and related media in the North West, Open Eye is host to three different artists during the Biennial. Koki Tanaka has recreated and filmed a strike in 1985 where around 10,000 children took to the streets of the city in protest against the Conservative government’s Youth Training Scheme – an initiative intended to reduce youth unemployment, but which was instead criticised as a means of providing cheap labour without guarantees. The work feels pointedly relevant to our society today.
Also adopting film as their medium, artists Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni (exhibiting at venues throughout the Biennial) present La Vallée Von Uexküll, a series of films of sunsets taken on cameras each bought by the artists after a significant jump in image resolution. The series will be complete when the camera can capture more than the human eye.
