Brighton Q&A: Submit your questions
Is there something that you want to ask about the Seagulls?BBC Radio Sussex reporter Johnny Cantor is ready to answer your questions for a special Q&A.Submit your question here and come back later this week to read a selection of his replies
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The Guardian
3 days ago
- The Guardian
Liverpool Biennial review – AI seagulls, gladiatorial football and big trouble in Chinatown
I narrowly avoided being 'relieved on' by a seagull in Liverpool. Another critic pulled me aside just in time. But then again, she pressed the button to release the airborne poo – fake, I think – in the first place. This is Kara Chin's funny installation in a cinema recreating the seediness of the seaside with squawking AI seagulls on video screens, chaotic electro-assemblages resembling mutant arcade machines and a floor covered with guano. Liverpool is not by the sea but close enough that seagulls provide a chorus as you walk between Liverpool Biennial art events in museums, galleries, warehouses and community centres. I can't see the Liver Birds on the skyline without remembering the first time I visited this city as small child, seeing my aunt off on a voyage across the Atlantic, from docks that then loomed with massive ships. Proustian memories of the biggest city I knew as a child return with a vengeance in a raw warehouse space where Turkish artist Cevdet Erek has created a homage to the noise and intensity of soccer crowds. He loves football and loud music. I meet him there and he enthuses about attending Anfield as research, and being inspired by a track on Pink Floyd's Meddle. Flashbacks of matches with my dad surge. But Erek's installion is not a literal portrayal of a football game. Instead it transfigures the noise and tension of a big match. The space is dominated by an arena made of brown, earthy bricks while a pounding soundtrack pumps from speakers in its seating areas. It's eerie and seems ancient, for the pebbly arena and stands make you think as much of gladiatorial games as modern soccer. Vicious drums increase the menace. But there are no people. It's a ruin excavated in the desert, to which a Floyd of the future have come to perform to the empty air. The 2025 Liverpool Biennial is entitled Bedrock and its best moments come when artists engage with the emotional bedrock of Liverpool itself – from football to religion. Is there a difference? At Bluecoat contemporary arts centre, Amy Claire Mills shows a bright, booming mural of Liverpool's coat of arms, reproducing its surreal mythology in which the sea god Neptune, a merman, dolphins and, of course, the Liver Birds all feature. Yet by and large the freshest experiences are to be had in site-specific works outside galleries and museums. The Walker Art Gallery's Biennial show of unmemorable art is eclipsed by the likes of Hogarth and Millais in its collection. Nour Bishouty has placed a wooden sculpture of a gazelle-like animal, inlaid with mother of pearl, on a plinth below a painting of an outsized ox by Liverpool-born 18th-century artist George Stubbs. Past beats present here. But enter Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, with its stupendous interior by Giles Gilbert Scott, and you see a veil of colour suspended against its brown craggy heights, a woven work by Cypriot artist Maria Loizidou that depicts people being raised up by angels into the heavens. Its imagery of redemption is positively medieval. Taking religion seriously turns out to be the freshest, most surprisingly successful aspect of this art festival in a multi-faith city. On the Liverpool skyline you can sometimes see both Scott's neo-medieval pile and the more graceful modernist Catholic cathedral. In the best artwork of the Biennial, Turner prize winner Elizabeth Price explores a question that might not occur to many people but she makes fascinating: how did Britain's Catholic communities come to build so many modernist churches? Her film, in a darkened hall in Liverpool's Chinatown, uses a suspenseful soundtrack, digital graphics and sinister negative images to ponder this. As Irish Catholic immigration to Britain increased in the 20th century, the growing community had to remedy a lack of Catholic churches. A new one was built around a century ago on Anglesey, the first stop for many Irish immigrants arriving by sea. Price tries to understand why it took a radical modernist form, an upturned ship's hull moulded in concrete by an Italian architect. She relates it to military architecture, including airship hangars, and the music becomes more threatening. Yet she doesn't seem satisfied with her own answers – and as a drum throbs, the colours and negative saturation get ever more lurid. For a moment I expected a horror ending, a murder in the cathedral. Instead she takes you inside some of the churches to see their mysticism enhanced by her effects, and it dawns on you. The supernatural force haunting these spaces is – can it be … God? I'd always thought of Price as a gothic artist. But just as William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist, was trying to promote the Catholic faith, so in this compelling artwork Price appears to reveal that she is, and always has been, a religious artist. Outside this city roars, profane and riotous, but under the skin it has a soul. The Liverpool Biennial has a lot of forgettable art in it. But at its best it cuts not just to the architectural but the spiritual heart of Liverpool. Huge as that heart is. The Liverpool Biennial opens 7 June
BBC News
4 days ago
- BBC News
Highest priced goalkeeper - how valuable are Brighton's players?
What a footballer can bring to a team and its fans can often be said to be invaluable, but every player has a for some, that is a very expensive to research from Swiss research group CIES Football Observatory, external, the current most valuable player in world football is Barcelona's teenage sensation Lamine Yamal, who could command a fee of around 400m euros (£340m) if someone dared to could be exciting - and worrying - for Brighton fans, is who is listed as the most valuable a model that is based on over 8000 player transactions worldwide between July 2014 and March 2024, Brighton's first-choice goalkeeper Bart Verbruggen has the highest fee for that position - 64m euros (£54m).In what has become quite a successful business model for the Seagulls in recent years, the club brings in lesser known talents and develops them into sought-after players that can be sold on for a much higher while from a financial perspective it keeps the club in a healthy position, some fans are beginning to ask at what point they stop being a selling club and are able to keep these talents for themselves and their own this week, our Brighton fan writer suggested "two big-money sales is arguably the maximum the Albion should consider" this with four players ranked in the top 100 most valuable, how realistic will that be?Midfielder Carlos Baleba ranks highest at 78m euros (£66m), followed by forwards Yankuba Minteh at 70m euros (£59m) and Joao Pedro at 68.7m euros (£57.9m).With possible fees all above £50m, it could be difficult for the club to turn down offers, and this is without taking into account any potential sale of Kaoru Mitoma who brings in interest in every transfer with a young manager heading into his second season in charge and the importance of these players to the side and Fabian Hurzeler's style, supporters will be hoping to avoid another season of transition so they can focus on European ambitions or silverware how do you feel about the high value of Brighton's players? Just how many could the club afford to lose if they want to achieve their aims?Let us know
BBC News
5 days ago
- BBC News
Burgess Hill man named Brighton & Hove Albion fan of the season
A lifelong Brighton & Hove Albion supporter who has terminal cancer has been crowned the club's fan of the Todd, from Burgess Hill, known to his friends as Toddy, has followed the Seagulls for more than 40 Todd was diagnosed with terminal cancer last November and said he only had about two months to 58-year-old was handed this year's accolade at the Brighton & Hove Albion Players' Awards last month in recognition of his decades of devotion. "I knew there was something going on, but I wasn't expecting what actually happened. It shocked me, to be quite honest," he told BBC Radio Todd recalled his first match against Blackburn Rovers at home in 1977."I was only about nine. I remember going down there, it was always the green pitch that got me," he then, Albion became a cornerstone of Mr Todd's life, allowing him to meet fellow fans like Andy Stonestreet, who was part of the group who nominated first meeting about 40 years ago, their friendship was a slow burn, Mr Stonestreet said."About 15 years ago we started travelling together, home and away, every game pretty much," he Stonestreet said he was "over the moon" to learn that his friend had won the Todd said the strength of those friendships, built through football, was helping him through a "really strange time"."I'm ill, but I don't feel like I'm going to die tomorrow," he said, adding that it felt "surreal".Given his prognosis, the 58-year-old said he was increasingly aware that there were certain things he was doing "for the last time"."That's a bit of a choker to say," he added.
