Events

PLATFORM: ZINE LAUNCH EVENT

21 March 2024

Home. Ukrainian Photography, UK Words: Tour

4 March - 28 February 2025

Exhibitions

Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words @ New Adelphi

4 March - 8 March 2024

Past Events

CREATIVE SOCIAL: IN THE ABSENCE OF FORMAL GROUND

2 March 2024

Exhibitions

We Feed The UK @ Exterior Walls

8 February - 31 March 2024

Events

Contrail Cirrus: the impact of aviation on climate change

7 March 2024

Exhibitions

Tree Story @ Liverpool ONE

16 February 2024

Open Source #27: Saffron Lily – In The Absence of Formal Ground @ Digital Window Gallery

6 February - 31 March 2024

Past Events

Contemporary Photography from Ukraine: Symposium @University of Salford

4 March - 5 March 2024

Past Events

Is Anybody Listening? Symposium: Commissioning and Collecting Socially Engaged Photography

29 February 2024

Past Events

Different approaches: Artists working with scientists

15 February 2024

Events

LOOK Climate Lab 2024: All Events

18 January 2024

Exhibitions

Diesel & Dust @ Digital Window Gallery

18 January - 31 March 2024

Events

Tree Walks Of Sefton Park with Andrea Ku

21 January 2024

Past Events

Artists Remake the World by Vid Simoniti: Book Launch

31 January 2024

Past Events

Shift Liverpool Open Meeting

6 February 2024

Past Events

We Feed The UK Launch and LOOK Climate Lab 2024 Celebration

8 February 2024

Past Events

Cyanotype workshop with Melanie King

17 February 2024

Past Events

End of Empire: artist talk and discussion

22 February 2024

Past Events

Book Launch: What The Mine Gives, The Mine Takes

24 February 2024

Past Events

Local ecology in the post-industrial era: open discussion

14 March 2024

Events

Plant a seed. Seed sow and in conversation with Plot2Plate

16 March 2024

Events

Waterlands: creative writing workshop

23 March 2024

Events

Erosion: panel discussion

9 March 2024

Events

Waterlands: an evening of poetry and photographs

23 March 2024

Events

Force For Nature Exhibition

27 March - 28 March 2024

Voices of Nature: Interactive Performances

28 March 2024

Past Events

Sum of All Parts: Symposium

27 February 2024

Exhibitions Main Exhibition

LOOK Climate Lab 2024

18 January - 31 March 2024

Past Events

MA Socially engaged photography Open Day event

1 February 2023

Past Events

Tish: Special screening and Q&A

13 December 2023

Past Events

Book Launch: A Look At A New Perspective

23 November 2023

Events

Community workshops @ Ellesmere Port Library

6 November - 5 February 2024

Past Events

Book Launch: ‘544m’ By Kevin Crooks

30 November 2023

Past Exhibitions

Bernice Mulenga @ Open Eye Gallery Atrium Space

17 November - 17 December 2023

Past Events

Bernice Mulenga: Artist Talk

18 November 2023

Past Exhibitions

Local Roots @ The Atkinson

14 October 2023

Exhibitions

Community @ Ellesmere Port Library

26 October - 11 April 2024

Past Events

Critique Surgery for Socially Engaged Photographers

6 November 2023

Past Events

Deeds Not Words: panel discussion

12 October 2023

Past Exhibitions

Deeds Not Words @ Atrium Space

3 October - 22 October 2023

Ode To Our Space @ Digital Window Gallery

29 September - 23 December 2023

A Look At A New Perspective @ Digital Window Gallery

29 September - 23 December 2023

Past Events

Book Launch: Crow Dark Dawn

19 October 2023

Past Events

Exhibition Launch: A Place of Our Own

28 September 2023

Reflections

12 September - 22 December 2023

Past Events

Sandra Suubi ‘Samba Gown’ Procession

9 September 2023

Exhibitions Future Exhibitions

A Place of Our Own

29 September - 22 December 2023

Past Events

POETRY BOOK LAUNCH: JACK BENNETT – LUNETTE

7 September 2023

Exhibitions

A Portrait of the High Street @ Prescot

31 August 2023

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Letizia Battaglia: Breaking The Code Of Silence

22 February - 4 May 2014

Open Eye Gallery presents for the first time in the UK the intense work of Sicilian photographer and photojournalist Letizia Battaglia (born 1935 in Palermo, Italy). A large selection of her iconic black and white images will be presented at the gallery, guiding the viewer along a journey into one of the darkest periods in the post-war Italian history. Drawing from Battaglia’s personal archive, comprising of over 600,000 images, the exhibition showcases work spanning from the mid ’70s to the early ’90s and also includes some recent projects. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to approach her genre-defining photographic practice (often linked to that of American ‘crime’ photographer Weegee) and reflect on the role of photography as an individual and collective means for taking action, bearing witness, providing evidence and documenting history.

Battaglia took up photography in the early ’70s, when she realised that, as a journalist, it was easier to place her articles in newspapers and magazines if these were accompanied by images. After a short period spent in Milan where she met her partner and collaborator Franco Zecchin, Letizia Battaglia returned to Sicily in 1974. After relocating to Palermo and regularly contributing to the daily L’Ora, she became the pictures editor until the newspaper was shut down in 1990.

Over the years, Battaglia has recorded her love/hate relationship to her home-country with (com)passion and dedication, often putting her life at risk. By alternating stark images of death, graphic violence and intimidation connected to the Mafia with poetic still-life photos and intense portraiture of children and women, Battaglia provides a textured and layered narrative of her country.

Letizia Battaglia worked on the front-line as a photo-reporter during one of the most tragic periods in contemporary Italian history, the so-called anni di piombo – the years of (flying) lead, as they say in Italian. “[These were] eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia’s dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.” (Peter Jinks, The Observer, 4 March 2012)

The selected works on show at Open Eye Gallery illustrate this period and document Battaglia’s attempt to come to terms with that history and reconcile the love for her country with the memory of these dramatic events.

Over the last two decades, Battaglia persevered in her struggle against the mafia. A fight that she pursued not only by means of her photographic work, but also as a politician and public figure, a publisher and as a woman.

Download the audio guide HERE

Watch ‘Letizia Battaglia: In Conversation’ on our YouTube channel HERE.

Watch ‘BATTAGLIA’, directed by Daniela Zanzotto HERE.

Open Eye Gallery presents for the first time in the UK the intense work of Sicilian photographer and photojournalist Letizia Battaglia (born 1935 in Palermo, Italy). A large selection of her iconic black and white images will be presented at the gallery, guiding the viewer along a journey into one of the darkest periods in the post-war Italian history. Drawing from Battaglia’s personal archive, comprising of over 600,000 images, the exhibition showcases work spanning from the mid ’70s to the early ’90s and also includes some recent projects. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to approach her genre-defining photographic practice (often linked to that of American ‘crime’ photographer Weegee) and reflect on the role of photography as an individual and collective means for taking action, bearing witness, providing evidence and documenting history.

Battaglia took up photography in the early ’70s, when she realised that, as a journalist, it was easier to place her articles in newspapers and magazines if these were accompanied by images. After a short period spent in Milan where she met her partner and collaborator Franco Zecchin, Letizia Battaglia returned to Sicily in 1974. After relocating to Palermo and regularly contributing to the daily L’Ora, she became the pictures editor until the newspaper was shut down in 1990.

Over the years, Battaglia has recorded her love/hate relationship to her home-country with (com)passion and dedication, often putting her life at risk. By alternating stark images of death, graphic violence and intimidation connected to the Mafia with poetic still-life photos and intense portraiture of children and women, Battaglia provides a textured and layered narrative of her country.

Letizia Battaglia worked on the front-line as a photo-reporter during one of the most tragic periods in contemporary Italian history, the so-called anni di piombo – the years of (flying) lead, as they say in Italian. “[These were] eighteen years in which the ferocious Corleonesi mafia clan would claim the lives of governors, senior policemen, entire mafia families and, ultimately, two of Battaglia’s dearest friends: the anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.” (Peter Jinks, The Observer, 4 March 2012)

The selected works on show at Open Eye Gallery illustrate this period and document Battaglia’s attempt to come to terms with that history and reconcile the love for her country with the memory of these dramatic events.

Over the last two decades, Battaglia persevered in her struggle against the mafia. A fight that she pursued not only by means of her photographic work, but also as a politician and public figure, a publisher and as a woman.

Download the audio guide HERE

Watch ‘Letizia Battaglia: In Conversation’ on our YouTube channel HERE.

Watch ‘BATTAGLIA’, directed by Daniela Zanzotto HERE.

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