Our picks for the Liverpool biennial

David Tompkins and Joe Banks

Talk 5–7pm, Saturday 6, FREE (Booking required)

Part of the Biennial’s ‘The Unexpected Guest’ series, David Tompkins’s and Joe Banks’s talks have been dubbed ‘performance lectures’ exploring the theme of ‘hospitality’, which spans the whole event.

David Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach explores the history of the vocoder (a system used to reproduce human speech) ranging from its uses in war and science, to music and all else in between. Tompkins is a captivating performer, an explosion of passion when loose in front of his audience.

Unlike Tompkins’s talk, Joe Banks’s doesn’t explore reproduction but instead interpretation, exploring the concept of human perception – an idea labelled ‘creative listening’. With his use of interactive examples, Banks draws in his audience and creates a truly one of a kind, totally unmissable, performance.

Time Topographies: Liverpool, 2012

Film 6:30pm, Tuesday 9, FREE (Booking required)

A further advocate of the ‘hospitality’ theme, Amanda Gutierrez’s film follows the lives of three immigrants of different age, gender and nationality living against the backdrop of modern day Liverpool. Provoking a precise description of Liverpool as a multi-cultural, multi-faced city through the medium of film, Gutierrez and her cast also conduct a Q&A following the film to expand upon the film’s ideas. You can find more info on it at www.Airsenegalinternational.com.

Cunard Building Tour

Tour 4pm, Thursday 4 & 18, FREE (Booking required)

LJMU Copperas Hill Building Tour

Tour 4pm, Thursday 11 & 25, FREE (Booking required)

Liverpool’s Cunard Building

The likelihood is you’ll be spending at least three years of your life traipsing around Liverpool’s windy, rainy northern streets so do yourself a favour and step indoors into one of the RIBA-run architectural tours (that’s the Royal Institute of British Architects). Sitting along the waterfront, one of Liverpool’s Three Graces, The Cunard Building, is bursting with Liverpudlian history to be discovered when guided through its gilded halls. The talk and tour also cover the Cunard’s neighbours The Liver Building and The Port of Liverpool Building (the other two of Liverpool’s ‘graces’) to give a rounded education on three of The ‘Pool’s most aesthetically striking and historically fascinating buildings.

If maritime history doesn’t float your boat (ha) then John Moores’s Copperas Hill Building may be more to your taste. Previously a post office, it lay abandoned until the good people at LJMU decided to give it a new lease of life as the epicentre of their campus. Opening for university use in 2014, the Copperas Hill Tour provides an insight into bizarre architectural foundations, reflecting the creative vision of new a university mind-set.

2Up2Down/Homebaked

Exhibition October, FREE

Although slightly out of the way of central Liverpool (Anfield), 2Up2Down/Homebaked is a truly unique communitarian work of art. Born in 2009, the brainchild of Dutch artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk, the project has taken young members of the Anfield community and given them the opportunity to re-design a disused bakery and its two adjoining terrace houses, creating a shop, housing scheme and meeting and project spaces for use within the community. Now open to the public for the Liverpool Biennial, this continuous project is a refreshing, compelling blend of art and communitarianism.

Electronic Voice Phenomena

Weekend Friday 5–Sunday 7, FREE

With its exciting blend of talks, workshops and live performances, The Electronic Voice Phenomena Weekend is set to be a huge event during this Liverpool biennial. Almost wholly taking place within The Blade Factory at Camp and Furnace the EVP seeks to explore the common ground between writing, music and performance through manipulation of voice.