When Koki Tanaka visited Liverpool for the first time, he came across a book, Liverpool in the 1980s, by photographer Dave Sinclair. The book contains images of a mass protest against the Conservative Government’s Youth Training Scheme, criticised as a means of providing cheap labour with no guarantee of a job at the end.

In Liverpool, where youth unemployment was as high as 80 percent in some areas, 10,000 young people took to the streets in opposition to the initiative. The march, which took place on 25 April 1985, began outside St George’s Hall and moved quickly down Dale Street, past the Town Hall, ending at the Pier Head. This wasn’t the route the organisers had planned, but the sheer enthusiasm of the students meant that the crowd moved fast and was hard to contain. For Tanaka, Sinclair’s photographs show an unusual combination of energy, optimism, joy and anger.

In June 2016, Tanaka revisited the scene of the protest, inviting original participants to share their memories of the event. They were joined by young people in order to reflect on the way in which the future that the students fought for in 1985 relates to the present political situation. This walk has been documented, and the resulting film is presented as part of the Children’s Episode and the Flashback episode, alongside photographs by Dave Sinclair.

Each time significant technological progress is made in image resolution, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni buy a new video camera and use it to film a sunset, but without a lens. The series, titled La Vallée Von Uexküll, and included as part of Flashback, will end when the camera is able to capture more than the human eye can see.

Three submersibles, Anti-Catty, Princess Rambo and Space-Sheep, have smuggled artwork from Dubai to Liverpool. By circumnavigating the normal procedures used to transport artworks from one place to another, they deliberately degrade the usual values assigned to art objects. In the gallery, and across other venues, are videos by Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam Rahmanian that document the daily lives of the submersibles, the smuggling and objects that have emerged from this process.

Open Eye Gallery was founded in 1977 and is the only gallery dedicated to photography and related media in the North West. 

Collaborating Curator: Thomas Dukes.