Houseplant Festival | Making Love Revolutionary | Passenger List | Criminal: UK | Sweet Chick...
Plant festivals, Brazilian artists, thriller podcasts, binge-worthy telly, and new chicken restaurants (of course!), this week our cultural round-up has something for everyone.
VISIT The Houseplant Festival. Time to get together with your potted pals this Sunday at Lambeth’s lovely Garden Museum which will be hosting the first ever Houseplant Festival, curated by journalist and author of How to Grow Stuff, Alice Vincent. This friendly event will be sure to inspire budding indoor gardeners and those with seasoned green fingers seeking inspiration for their urban jungles. With workshops, houseplant clinics, a chance to meet Instagram’s top plant experts and browse a curated selection of plant shops, artists and designers, this celebration of leafy delights is sure to lift the spirits and be a breath of fresh (extra oxygen-infused) air. It is also a great chance to get to know one of London’s loveliest museums, which showcases Britain’s historic love-affair with gardens and gardening.
For more information, visit https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/events/houseplant-festival/ and follow @alice_emily @GardenMuseumLDN.
SEE Making Love Revolutionary, the first UK retrospective of the Brazilian artist, Anna Maria Maiolino, which comes to Whitechapel Gallery this week, bringing together 150 works (spanning six decades) - many on display in the UK for the first time. With simple materials like clay, paper and ink, she creates striking and powerful narratives about the human body, politics, repression and the human condition. Created in the context of Brazil’s military regime, Maiolino’s films and photographs explore the scarcity of food she experienced in her childhood and many works draw upon the themes of survival under authoritarian regimes. A fascinating chance to get to know this thought-provoking and multi-dimensional artist, this is a rare opportunity to catch her work in the UK.
For more information, visit www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/anna-maria-maiolino/ and follow @_Thewhitechapel on Twitter.
LISTEN to Passenger List, a gripping eight-part mystery thriller podcast starring Star Wars actress Kelly Marie Tran in the lead role, alongside co-stars Colin Morgan, Patti LuPone and Rob Benedict. This slickly produced audio drama from PRX’s Radiotopia follows the story of Atlantic Flight 702, a missing aircraft allegedly hit by a bird strike mid-flight between London and New York, with 256 passengers on board. But Kansas college student Kaitlin Le is convinced there’s more to it. On her mission to uncover the truth about what happened to her twin brother who was on the flight, listeners are introduced to a lost child at Heathrow airport, families of missing passengers, airport staff, and all the witnesses in between. From immigration and terrorism, to love, loss and grief, the series takes you on an emotional journey as you find yourself immersed in Kaitlin’s quest to unravel the truth. We started listening to the first two episodes last week and have the third episode queued and ready for our next 30-minute commute. Happy listening!
Passenger List is available to listen at passengerlist.org, and most other podcast platforms. For updates and to join in the conversations, follow @passengerpod and @Radiotopia on Twitter.
WATCH Criminal: UK. If you’re a fan of tense and suspenseful police dramas with a twist of psychological game-playing, then this latest Netflix anthology won’t disappoint. Three pulsating UK episodes, featuring the likes of David Tennant, Hayley Atwell, Clare-Hope Ashitey and Youssef Kerkour, form part of the pan-European 12-parter, which also contains French, Spanish and German trilogies. The premise is simple yet extremely effective – police detectives grill suspects for confessions of crimes they may, or may not, have committed. But the beauty of Criminal is that it turns police interrogation into something of an art form, as the detectives deploy a range of tactics, wordplay, body language and other tricks, in order to wear down steely, stubborn suspects, bypass slithery solicitors and get to the truth. All the action is filmed in a single location – the interrogation room (and surroundings) of a generic police station - which is somehow reminiscent of one-location movies such as Rope, Phone Booth and Locke. David Tennant, who, in the first episode plays a doctor accused of murdering his teenage step-daughter, delivers a stunning performance as the detectives gradually chip away at his alibi and cool demeanour.
Criminal, including the Criminal: UK trilogy, is out now on Netflix. Follow #CriminalNetflix on Twitter.
DINE at Sweet Chick, an authentic American chicken and waffle restaurant tipped to open in Oxford Street on 26 September. Founded in Brooklyn by restaurateur John Seymour in 2013, and now backed by rap royalty, super-fan and co-owner Nas, Sweet Chick is the latest celebrity haunt on the dining scene to hit the capital. You can hate me now, but if you feel like chicken tonight, this isn’t a place to go if you’re watching your figure. Expect some serious comfort food – southern fried chicken on waffles with maple syrup, mac and cheese, cornbread, shrimp and grits and a doughnut ice-cream sandwich which might send you into a sugar coma. Rumour has it that Cameron Diaz is also a fan so if she can eat there, I know I can, eat, what I wanna eat. If you work hard at it, you can eat, what you wanna eat. Right? And now count all the Nas puns!
For more information and updates on the opening, visit their www.sweetchick.com and follow them on Instagram @Sweetchicklife.
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