Category: ARTS (2022)

Writers Beth Exley, Emily Doyle & Rachel Westwood/Photographers Katja Ogrin, Emily Doyle & Hassan Ul-Haq

Flatpack Festival is an annual multi-day event that aims to celebrate film in all its form, as well as the intersection between cinema and other kinds of art. Scattered amongst many venues in Birmingham – from the MAC, to Mockingbird, to The Electric – Flatpack is a vibrant cultural event that has something for everybody.

The mobile arts organisation, founded in the early 2000s, has sought to bring together like-minded people, create unforgettable events, and give local artists and filmmakers a vital opportunity to debut and promote their work to new audiences.

This 2022 edition was the first in-person program delivered by Flatpack in three years, and they truly are back with a bang. The program (which by the way is beautifully designed) is full to the brim of exciting and eclectic screenings, performances, and experiences, and is a real testimony to the excellent curatorial approach of the team behind the festival.

ICHI Anime Show (19 May)

At The Printmakers Arms, instrument maker and one-man-band ICHI is showcasing his latest project. You hear him before you see him, teetering in on stilts while playing a harmonica. One of those stilts doubles as a makeshift shamisen, which he later uses to play a song about a mosquito.

ICHI’s performance this evening is split into two sets – the first, a series of short songs on topics as wide ranging as “animals”, “my favourite Chinese restaurant in Japan”, and “a bathroom” – the latter was mostly toothbrushing.

He performs with a clownish sensibility on his host of homemade instruments. Towards the end of this set he sets aside what appears to be a oud with a slinky attached to the back and proceeds to pour a jug of water into the steelpan he’s been playing. It’s deadpan, absurd, and joyous.

ICHI’s second set is a new commission created for Flatpack. He screens a selection of Japanese experimental animated short films from the 60s, 70s, and 80s and performs his new soundtracks live.

Osamu Tezuka’s ‘Jumping’ is accompanied by the bouncing of an exercise ball, while Yoji Kuri’s ‘Love’ is given a new vocal soundtrack with slapstick minimalism.

These works have the tinge of nuclear threat that you’d expect from post-war Japan, and it makes for a much more unsettling set than the first.

Tattered Earth (20 May)

The room is full to the brim with diverse characters in fancy dress and what looks like an explosion of Tat’s signature gags. Piles and piles of charity shop items, namely, Birmingham’s biggest collection of Sideways DVDs, strange-looking vintage kids games, and of course a huge papier-mâché creation of Tat’s head dangling precariously from the ceiling.

“Are you ready?” is heard over a microphone and Tat and his characters enter in WWE-style, setting the perfect tone for the rest of the show.

It’s a pantomime atmosphere at its finest: as the performance begins, audience members are already jeering back at him, interacting at any given opportunity. Overshadowing the stage is a huge projector screen that cycles through a series of clips about the life of Tat, featuring, to my delight, appearances from some Birmingham favourites such as Ruth from Ruth and The Ark, Joe Lycett, and Dion Kitson to name but a few.

The most poignant moment of the introduction is when a ‘Young Tat’ appears on screen sporting a huge brown moustache which quickly elicits raucous laughter from the crowd.

The loosely threaded storyline focused on the antagonists (well established in previous shows) called ‘Lux’ and his plastics. However, this isn’t where the show excelled; the real enjoyment to be had was in watching the performers interact with members of the audience.

Be it responding abruptly to a heckle or calling out a certain Birmingham Review journalist for making them nervous by taking notes on her phone. Certainly not making that mistake again. Pen and paper it is.

Latenight Tales with Cecil Morris (May 20-21)

At the Mockingbird on Saturday night, Cecil Morris presents a double feature of Latenight Tales as part of Flatpack’s new Wonderland project.

Garry Stewart from Recognize Black Heritage Culture organisation hosts the evening, opening with an inspiring Q&A. Morris, a DJ and entrepreneur, tells the audience how he set up a regular late-night slot at the Elite Cinema on Soho Road back in the 1970s to combat the dearth of Black representation in film.

How he discovered Steel Pulse. How he set up his pirate broadcasting operation PCRL and spent twenty years fighting to keep it on the airwaves. When the authorities finally caught up to him and sentenced him to months of community service, he enjoyed it so much that he carried on volunteering with the day centre afterwards.

Morris is magnetic. His story is one of inventiveness, mutual aid, and ultimately a love for cinema. After the talk, he’s curated a typically inventive double bill of Blacula (1972) and, The Dragon, The Hero (1979). Due to the limited films available, back in the Elite Cinema days he’d usually screen one piece of Black cinema followed by one martial arts flick.

With Morris’ reggae selections playing in the interval, Stewart quips that it’s like being back at the Elite, “only with a lot less ganja smoke”.

AIDS on Film: Silverlake Life – The View From Here – Q&A from director, Peter Friedman, and Peter Tatchell (21 May)

I had never heard of Silverlake Life (1993) before looking through the Flatpack programme, however, the phrase ‘AIDS on film’ stood out to me amongst the events as being quite different in tone.

As someone with a keen interest in queer history and particularly in the AIDS epidemic, I decide I should go along. In screen-one of the Mockingbird Cinema, I encounter a deeply sad and harrowing piece of film.

Looking around as the credits roll, it is clear everyone else in here has experienced the same thing – there is not a dry eye in sight.

Silverlake Life was filmed by American director Tom Joslin as a video diary during the last few months of his life as he succumbed to AIDS. It details his beautiful long-term relationship with Mark Rossi, an actor also suffering from AIDS, their life, his medical treatments, and ultimately his death and its immediate aftermath.

Silverlake Life was then finished and edited by his friend and student, Peter Friedman, months after his death.

Friedman talks in the Q&A about how Tom believed in ‘in your face’ film making, and that is the perfect way to describe Silverlake Life.

It shows AIDS in raw and horrifying detail. I would say this film is essential viewing (although I must provide a large content warning as I say this) due to its importance in queer history and its unflinching portrayal of this massive part of global history

Earwig Screening at Mockingbird Cinema (21 May)

Reclining on one of the sofa seats in Mockingbird’s second screen room, I am very excited for Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig (2021) to begin. We have just been given an introduction by a member of the flatpack team who described it as a ‘body horror nightmare’ which sounds incredibly up my street. I’ve got my popcorn and Dr. Pepper ready and I’m ready for a few screams.

We’re twenty-minutes in and I realise there has not been a single line of dialogue.

Maybe this is too slow a burn for someone with my tiktok addled attention span…

On hearing a description of this film, it sounds like it should be amazing – a strange man who must maintain a little girl’s teeth made of ice? Sign me up. But ultimately, the lack of any discernible narrative or plot made this very difficult for me to enjoy.

Aesthetically it was gorgeous, and the sound design was brilliant, but I think overall, this just kind of went over my head and I’m left feeling confused and dissatisfied as the credits roll.

Although I appreciate the fact Flatpack highlighted this work by a female, French director, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

Bioinspiration at Flatpack Hub (22 May)

The set up in the flatpack hub for Bioinspiration is very intriguing; there’s a few tables at the far end of the room that take me back to my A Level biology classes. There’s beakers, test tubes, seaweeds, shells, and what looks like microscopes.

To the left, there’s a synth and a record player and then two large projection screens. I’m excited for what I’m about to see.

Chemist Zoe Schnapps, artist Laura Spark and musician Jonathan Hering start their work and I’m immediately taken by it. Schnapps and Spark move cameras around the science equipment, blending close-up visuals of a sea urchin shell, into what I think was snakeskin, and then into seaweed, making a moving natural collage of texture in front of our eyes.

Whilst we watch this on the screen, Hering begins playing the synth inspired by what he sees. I’m reminded of fractal theory by the way droplets in water look like bacteria, and the shells look like mountain formations from an aerial view.

After about half an hour of this mesmerising, sensuous experience, the audience gets to participate in the experimentation. From the children to an elderly couple, everyone excitedly approaches the front.

And I leave feeling connected to nature and inspired by the world we inhabit.

Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack (22 May)

For my final flatpack event I am back at Mockingbird in the larger screen one. As a long-term fan of photorealist painter Audrey Flack, I was very excited to hear that a couple of her works were being exhibited at Birmingham’s own Ikon earlier in the year.

This excitement was furthered when I saw Queen of Hearts (2020) was being screened at Flatpack.

Having been made shortly before the pandemic and repeated lockdowns, Queen of Hearts has not really had the reception the creators hoped for. The film documents Flack’s life story, artistic process, motherhood, relationships with other artists, and her return to painting after thirty years of not touching a canvas.

It’s a lovely and heart-warming piece that shines light upon an often forgotten and neglected, but significant and influential modernist artist. The way it highlights the specific difficulties of being a woman working within the art world and how her gender impacted her reputation is particularly strong.

Flatpack’s decision to include this documentary in the line-up was a great moment of collaboration between the festival and Ikon. It’s also great to see a female artist, who should be remembered as a pioneer of photorealism, get her dues during her lifetime.

For more from Flatpack Festival and the films they had on offer go to: www.flatpackfestival.org.uk

Writer Reece Greenfield / Photographer Daisy Richardson

Recently, I caught up with Birmingham born and bread artist (and my drinking buddy) Robbie Jeffcott. In the evening sunshine in his Kings Heath back-garden we quaffed offy-bought tinnies and began to talk about his influences, his processes, and the results… his wonderful art.

“I’m very interested in Realism”, says Robbie. “Chuck Close for example… I am also inspired by graffiti and abstract art and that’s how my style has developed into what it is now… Realism is really impressive that people can do that… I want to put my own spin on that.”

Robbie is also proud to talk of the role his father’s art plays:

“My father passed away when I was young and my Mom had a load of drawings he’d done and it’s basically how I got into art. I thought it was impossible to get his soft tones on pencil, so I used to analyse his drawings and try and replicate them so somewhere I have a load of half down replicas of my father’s drawings.”

I’m interested to find out if there’s a unifying theme, something that Robbie likes to weave through all of his pieces.

“The way I use colours, I use them very mathematically in my head. with the colour wheel, if I want certain bits to pop, I will use the opposite colours so the way I use colour unifies my pieces.

“I really got into colour theory. Once you know how certain colours are perceived you can use them in different ways, for example green and red; red will come forward, green will go backward as green naturally has more depth.”

I know Robbie is an extremely versatile artist, so the specifics are key.

“The one I tend to use the most is acrylic. Acrylic dries super-fast. I can build up layers that way, do a layer, let it dry, build it up, that’s how I get all the chaos going on.”

Having featured on Sky Arts Portrait Artist of The Year 2021, I wanted to know if there were any projects that Robbie thought us fans should be keeping an eye on.

“Oh, I’ve got a good one for ya… I found this big, framed piece of Jesus in a charity shop – it was made out of mesh. I cut the face and hands out and put them onto a psychedelic body and it glows in the dark.

“People theorise that a lot of the Bible could be explained through psychedelics… Moses and the burning bush for example. So, I called it the Holy Quaternity, insinuating that there’s a missing piece.

“I also created these five characters all wearing different hats and I’ve pasted them all round  Digbeth outside independent businesses. I’m doing a treasure hunt, so if you have to tag me and the business and the first one to find all gets a free painting… I thought it would be a fun thing to do, a community thing, it gets people visiting small businesses.”

Anyone who’s walked down Gibb Street recently will no doubt have seen the giant Mike Skinner mural outside Autobrew. It turns out that was the largest piece he’d done and his first real experience with spray paint.

“My mate owns the bar and I said can I paint on that wall? I love that spot and he said he wanted a Birmingham artist, so he decided on Mike Skinner. In my head, it’s still not finished. So, over the next year or so I think I’m just going to keep adding bits on it if I have my pens on me.

“It was the first large scale piece I’d done and normally I’d use paints, but that was massive so I needed to use spray cans – I’d never used that before so that was all new to me.”

And of course I have to ask what it was like on Sky Arts.

“My Mom, for years, had told me to apply for the competition. You had to apply with a portrait of yourself, so I submitted it and got on the show. You have a celebrity sitter and have to paint them… for hours is no time.

“You don’t know who you’re painting until they walk in front of you.”

Well, who was it? None other than “Ian Hislop, ha ha!”

“He’s the worst person to paint ever, he’s got no definition to his face, he’s literally a big blop.”

Between laughs Robbie continues: “But yeah that was a good experience and it got me a lot of exposure. After that show I got a load of commissions in and that’s what kickstarted me to think ok I could actually do this as a job.”

Robbie’s art (including the Ian Hislop timelapse) can be found on his Instagram page @rjeffcott and around Digbeth. If you spot any of his pieces, be sure to tag him on social media and support local artists.

If you like what you see, you can also email rjeffcott1194@gmail.com for any bookings.

Writer Ed King / Photographer Holly Revell

Riot Act, Alexis Gregory’s solo show, landed at Birmingham Rep as part of a ten date Pride Tour across the UK – produced by Emmerson and Ward, funded by Arts Council England, and road tested at the London LGBT literary salon, Polari.

A verbatim script of three separate interviews with men who lived, loved, and fought through pivotal moments in LGBTQ+ history, Riot Act is an hour of directly personal history – recanted and dramatised through a solo performance.

One man, three voices, and a visceral account of gay life and liberation – from the Stonewall Riots to the horrors and aftershock of HIV and AIDS – Riot Act begins with Michael, ‘a sixty five year old gay male’ who’s first night in New York was spent gathering hot water for battered queens during the iconic “perfect storm” on Christopher Street in 1969.

Arguably the turning point for gay liberation, or even the starting point, it would have been tempting to spend the next 60 minutes recounting tales of the iconic battle between New York’s finest and the Stonewall queens – when the Village fought back against years of police brutality, bullying, and a wider society with a woeful blind eye.

Michael’s memories are rich and Gregory commands centre stage with borrowed anecdotes – such as the NYPD choosing to turn up and turf out the Stonewall clientele during a Judy Garland screening of A Star Is Born, a week after the gay icon had died. Big mistake.

But the narrative and history lesson hands the baton to Lavinia, or Vin, who is “much more East End” – and introduces us to the “radical drag” scene of London’s pre-property boom era, when Notting Hill “was a dump.”

Switching from one clearly defined character to another, Gregory’s storytelling is wonderful, opening up the personal pages of another’s history and the shared memories of subjects – with a prominent thread tying all three together.

As the 60’s and 70’s lit a fuse of liberation, and that fuse started a glorious fire, the 80’s would respond with a tidal wave of loss and fear – as HIV and AIDS decimated a community finally starting to be recognised.

Lavinia explains: “HIV made us visible.”

But Riot Act is not a theatre show about HIV or AIDS, specifically, as Gregory would explain after the show the stories of the men interviewed dictated the narrative.

But as a man who grew up as a child under that particularly dark cloud, it is curiously pertinent to remind ourselves the word pandemic once meant something else. Something truly cruel and frightening, as Vin remembers going to “32 funerals in one month” and Paul recognises the “poor taste” of older gay men complaining about their advancing years as “some people didn’t even reach thirty.”

Short, bittersweet, and fantastically delivered, Riot Act is what many theatre critics would refer as a ‘must see’. But it really is – funny, entertaining, informative, original, and a directly personal oral history we should never forget.

So, live a little and learn something. And spend 60 minutes delving through the diaries of three gay men you’re unlikely to ever meet but who you can still get to know.

Coming to a theatre near you, although not back in Birmingham – Riot Act will also be streamed online in August, available through Alexis Gregory’s website.

Riot Act – offical trailer

For more on Alexis Gregory and Riot Act visit www.alexisgregory.co.uk/riot-act

For more form the Birmingham Rep visit www.birmingham-rep.co.uk

Writer Alex Shough / Photographer Marion Savary

When my partner’s friend realised they’d double-booked themselves and couldn’t make the Trixie Mattel show they’d bought tickets for in 2020, I was all like “oh no, I’m so sorry your friend can’t go with you, so I’m going instead right?”

Props to Becci for not checking her calendar when booking a holiday, appreciated.

It’s the perfect chance for my partner to wear their Trixie/Gazin dress and receive all the praise it deserves. And more importantly, the perfect chance for me to absorb all the ancillary praise having paid for it.

If you don’t already know (and hunny you should) Trixie Mattel is an American based drag queen and winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 3. After a 15-minute preview of Trixie Mattel’s new motel makeover show as some kind of a support slot, the show kicks off with a filmed sketch of Trixie visiting their gynaecologist, played by their UNHhhh co-star Katya Zamolodchikova.

What quality kitsch-smut.

Played in by their two-piece touring band, Trixie then took to the stage in the first of 14 outfits to the tune of ‘We got the look’, one of about eight songs they would perform. Yes, I counted the costumes but not the songs – priorities.

The performances, a greatest hits of originals and covers, are interspersed with some solid stand-up that even a straight cis guy could enjoy, Trixie’s bedazzled with several well executed costume reveals – plus one not so well executed costume reveal.

My personal-hetero-highlights include Trixie trying to be honest but relatable, singing ‘Hey Rich People’ to the front-row with those in nosebleeds distance playing the butt of the joke, and Jesse Eisenberg turning up (via recording) to applaud his own ode ‘Jesse’s Girl’. Finally, Trixie’s moving and brooding cover of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’.

I give the renowned ‘Skinny Legend’ and her stunning show £33 worth of thumbs ups, and a whole full Symphony Hall worth of ‘yay, free ticket!’

For more from Trixie Mattel take a look at www.trixiemattel.com

To find out what’s on at Birmingham Symphony Hall go to the BMusic website: www.bmusic.co.uk

Writer Harry Croxford / Photographer Erin Connolly

The Ikon Gallery in Brindley Place conducts the first UK exhibition of Sámi artist, Britta Marakatt-Labba: Under the Vast Sky.

From iconic embroidered pieces to more recent experiments with sculpture, each piece foregrounds the struggles, cosmic mythology, and voice of the Sámi as they navigate state authority, colonising industry, and now, climate change.

The Sámi are indigenous peoples whose population spreads through the combined northern territories of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. These nations, and their artificial borders, divide the cultural region known locally as Sápmi.

Historically suppressed by these states – first through religion, then through industrial expansion – over the past few decades, contemporary Sámi artists have sought to reclaim their narratives and identities. Clothing, arts, and cultural practices like reindeer herding, have been centred in attempts to express the meaning of what it means to be Sámi today.

One such artistic medium is the yoik: a traditional form of song performed by the Sámi.

The yoik is malleable, yet personal. An expression of a singer’s identity, it is a most distinctly Sámi form, popularised by contemporary artists and singers seeking to navigate traditional identities and contemporary forms.

In this way, the yoik becomes a model for the Sámi artist-activist Britta Marakatt-Labba. Working primarily with embroidery as her medium, her meticulous and careful practice bridges narrative with image and represents scenes from her own life and from Sámi experience.

Particular scenes open out onto the broader cultural story like the yoik, as Marakatt-Labba remarks in an interview with Berlin Art Link: “My work is like singing a Sámi yoik: there’s no beginning and no end. It’s like a circle”.

As you enter Ikon Gallery’s second floor, the site of Marakatt-Labba’s first UK exhibition, you witness this circle. Scenes plucked from Marakatt-Labba’s childhood conjoin with the mythologised and historical.

Here: trees, felled for lumber as Sámi look on. There, the traditional and protected practice of reindeer herding. Elsewhere, Sápmi land with the cosmos above and underworld below represented through vivid depth and colour. Everywhere: events in time where each work communicates with one another, forming a distinctive symbolic vocabulary.

In ‘Garjiat/The Crows’ (1981/2001) shapeless dark forms impose themselves from the top of the canvas. The gaze lowers, and these blots of mottled embroidery turn into crows. This murder transforms anew into the black uniforms of Norwegian police. They trudge through the snow to violently remove Sámi protestors encamped in their Lavvu – a traditional temporary dwelling.

This piece is a documentary-cum-mythological representation of an episode in the Álta conflict in the 1970s, where indigenous populations of the Sápmi confronted the expansion of both state and industry. Its namesake originates from the flashpoint surrounding the construction of a hydroelectric plant in Sápmi land.

Ancestors, for whom the Sámi are in constant communication, invoke the presence and force of history. The past as it persists in this way is invoked in ‘Historja/History’ (2003): presented via a video installation and preparatory watercolour, the viewer is exposed to the painstaking process of craft.

Here, historical events co-exist with mythology. By narrativizing this, and through this vividly constructed panorama of Sámi culture, Marakatt-Labba invites the viewer to consider what is lost, gained, and meaningful about the narratives we tell ourselves.

This exhibition extends beyond the embroidered form that Marakatt-Labba is most known for: we see preparatory watercolour sketches, installation pieces, and extending from her recent interest: sculpture. But as the yoik is indivisibly, distinctly, Sámi, so is Marakatt-Labba’s unique work. Something she implores us not to forget.

You can visit Britta Marakatt-Labba: Under the Vast Sky at Ikon Gallery, until 29 May 2022 – for more details visit: www.ikon-gallery.org/exhibition/britta-marakatt-labba

For more from the Ikon Gallery take a look at their website: www.ikon-gallery.org

For more on Britta Marakatt-Labba visit: www.brittaml.se