Time Tunnel Festival 10-13 May

We are delighted to be participating in the Time Tunnel Festival in Liverpool’s Fabric District this weekend, showing items from two of our collections. The Festival opens on Thursday 10th May at 6.30pm in The Tapestry Gallery, a new arts space in Kempston Street. Curated by Professor John Hyatt from the Liverpool School of Art and Design at LJMU, the Festival aims to revisit the creative expression of 1968 – a year of creativity and upheaval, rights and repression, war and protest, revolt and innovation that culminated with Apollo 8 flying around the Moon and astronaut, Bill Anders, for the first time, photographing the Earth rising above the lunar landscape. Newly created art is being shown and performed alongside archival documents, prints and photographs in various locations.

From LJMU Special Collections and Archives we have lent a set of 33 photomontage prints by artist John Heartfield. These have been expertly framed for the event by Jacksons in Slater Street and will be shown in The Gift of John Heartfield at Tapestry. John Heartfield was one of the founders of Berlin Club Dada. He went on to invent the technique of photomontage: cutting up otherwise waste photographs and reassembling them with glue to create stunning political artworks against war, fascism, and The Third Reich. In 1968, students at the Liverpool School of Art invited John Heartfield to speak here. In 1976, the moment of Punk’s revival of photomontage, his widow, Gertrud, gifted the Art School a complete set of Heartfield’s pre-WW2 anti-Nazi photomontage posters. It has remained in the Liverpool John Moores University library archives ever since. The box containing it has crumbled and decayed. The gift is exhibited here for the first time. In addition, don’t miss a talk by John J. Heartfield, grandson of the artist, at the Walker Art Gallery on Friday 11th May.

Drawing on rare material from our Situationist International: John McCready Archive a second exhibition will be open over the Festival weekend at Liverpool School of Art & Design in the John Lennon Building, Duckinfield Street. Believe in the Ruins: Situationists|1968|Sex Pistols features a range of rare books, magazines, unique flyers, exclusive posters and original record sleeves, many of which have never been on public display before. Curators Professor Colin Fallows and John McCready will give the opening talk at the Walker Art Gallery at 1pm on 11th May. The archive is so rich and varied we have decided to host four viewings of additional material at the Aldham Robarts Library, Maryland Street. Booking is not essential but there are further details on our Eventbrite pages for each visit: