Reino Unido:Schoolchildren’s strike puts Liverpool Biennial on the march

A 1985 demonstration at which 10,000 schoolchildren skipped school to protest against the Conservative government’s controversial Youth Training Scheme (YTS), is to be revisited in a new mass-participation art project.

The project, by the Japanese artist Koki Tanaka, will be part of this year’s Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest contemporary art festival which is commissioning new work from 42 artists.

Tanaka said he planned to gather together people who were on the original march, asking them to bring their children to recreate it along the route from St George’s Hall to the Pier Head.

How many he gets remains to be seen. “Even if it is only 20 I want to restage the march,” he said. “But there might be hundreds, or thousands.”

Tanaka came across the story of the march when he visited the radical Liverpool bookshop News from Nowhere and saw a photograph of the protest by Dave Sinclair.

“Most of the time when you look at images of people protesting they are quite serious,” he said, “but these kids were optimistic, it had a carnival feeling.

“I wanted to see how these kids have grown up, what they think about the present situation.”

Tanaka is known for collective actions, whether that is tea-making, piano playing or collective haircuts. This week he will also open his first solo show in the UK at the Showroom gallery in north London and is planning a Local History Research Tour (ending in a very British way at the Green Man pub) and an action called Reading Aloud People’s Names in the Community in which school pupils will be doing just that.

Details of the 2016 Biennial programme were released on Thursday. Its director, Sally Tallant, said there would be more curators involved for its ninth edition, and more new commissions.

The festival would be divided into six “episodes” drawing from Liverpool’s past, present and future, she said.

Tanaka will be in the “children’s episode” as will the always wacky performance artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd who is creating a film with young people called Dogsy Ma Bone, based on both Betty Boop and Bertolt Brecht.

Tallant said she was particularly pleased to have the Birkenhead-born Mark Leckey as part of the festival. The Turner prize-winning artist will present a film called Dream English Kid, inspired by memories of seeing Joy Division in Eric’s Club on Mathew Street.

Liverpool Biennial will run from 9 July-16 October.