Turner Prize winner works with young people to create mesmerising video art
Future Forecast at Tate Liverpool/RIBA North, The Fête of Britain at Aviva Studios, Open 2024 at The Grundy
What happens when you ask a group of young people to imagine the future? While kids in the 80s were dreaming of flying skateboards and robot teachers, many of today’s teenagers have minds packed with collapsing glaciers and ravaging forest fires.
When Tate Liverpool asked this of young people from The Greenhouse Project, a multi-cultural play and arts project in the Lodge Lane area of Liverpool, they brought those images closer to home by creating an audio-visual work that merges scenes of natural disasters with footage of their home city.
Initially created for a one-off event before Tate Liverpool’s Albert Dock venue closed for refurbishment, Future Forecast has now been given an extended run at the venue’s new home, in RIBA North at Mann Island.
The young people worked with Birkenhead-born Turner Prize-winner Mark Leckey, composer and sound producer Silv-o and artist Roy Claire Potter to create the piece, which draws the dreadful threat of climate destruction from seemingly far-off countries right to our own front door.
“We were looking at ice caps melting in the Antarctic, really heavy pollution in New York, Californian wildfires, things happening across the world and realising that could happen to our city in the future,” says Sha-Rae Riley, 16, who was one of the teenagers on the project.
“Mark was really lovely. He let us do our own thing but if we had an idea he would help us find a good way of doing it. We knew we could give him our ideas and they would be done well.
“Before we met him we’d spoken about him a lot and looked at a lot of his art works, and we quite liked his style of art, so when we met him we said we wanted to do that fast-paced work with short, snappy clips. You can look at it and immediately know what you’re looking at but there are aspects of it you’d need to think about.”
The opening of Future Forecast is reminiscent of a meditation film. Mesmerising footage of pink and neon green-tinged waves, the sun rising over the docks, a sunflower - but then it starts to build and the clips get shorter and faster, the music more disrupted and urgent, the images crashing over one another so that Liverpool appears to be scorched by raging fires and drowned by rushing floodwater.
Sha-Rae says: “We wanted it to be really relaxing at the start and by the end for you to feel confused by what it is.
“We wanted it to play on people’s minds a bit, and obviously everyone has their own interpretations of it, which is what we wanted.”
Tate Liverpool has a long history of working with young people, in a way that gives them a lot of creative freedom. The Greenhouse Project was given an open brief - they could create almost anything they wanted.
“I think it’s very important younger people get an influence on what happens in the city. We’re the next generation so it’s important we get a say. It’s our future,” says Sha-Rae.
That includes shaping the future of Tate Liverpool, which closed in the autumn for £30m revamp that will take two years to complete. Sha-Rae has strong ideas about what she would like to see in the gallery when it reopens.
“A lot of the work there is abstract. It would be nice to have more maximalist work there,” she says. “I’d like to see more big, extravagant pieces.”
Future Forecast is at Tate Liverpool/RIBA NW until March 10.
We’re Also Buzzing About…
The Fête of Britain: From February 22-24, Aviva Studios will be taken over by Hard Art, a group of artists, musicians and creatives including Brian Eno, Es Devlin, Cornelia Parker and Jeremy Deller who have come together to respond to the crisis in democracy and the climate emergency. They will present play, talks and performances asking how we can face up to the challenges of the 21st century and make the world safer, fairer and better. More details here.
Open 2024: The Grundy’s Open Exhibition, demonstrating the wide range of artwork being produced throughout Blackpool and the Fylde Coast, opens tomorrow. Works must have been created over the past 12 months and never ben shown at the Grundy before. Runs until March 30. More here.
Thank you for reading this week’s Stored Honey - and thanks for your feedback over the past few weeks. It was great to see on X that National Museums Liverpool director Laura Pye enjoyed the Sculpture Walking Tour of Liverpool University Campus after reading about it in last week’s edition. If you’d like to get in touch, you can do so on X/Twitter, in the comments or by emailing tostoredhoney@gmail.com.
Have a great week,
Laura