The Narrators @ Walker Art Gallery/The Royal Standard, Liverpool

The slogan ‘Heroin Kills’ in cold granite is not something you expect to see among the Walker Art Gallery’s Victorian portraits. A work by artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, this intervention is part of the Walker’s latest exhibition, The Narrators, where modern and contemporary artworks from the Arts Council Collection have been selected to create new language and meaning within the Walker’s collection of fine and decorative art – for example, on the gallery’s first floor landing, Becky Beasley's black-and-white sculptural photographs are placed in visual dialogue with Auguste Rodin’s 19th-century sculptures from the Walker’s collection (Rodin was one of the first sculptors to use photography in the process of making sculpture).

Stand-out interventions include the rarely exhibited Suncycle by British concrete poet and artist Kenelm Cox, exhibited within a cabinet of the Walker’s neoclassical sculptures, and the subtle inclusion of E’wao Kagoshima’s Stopped Liquid (cup), its pouring motion resting perfectly within a cabinet of Victorian decorative art. These clever exposures of unexpected parallels between artists working generations apart reveal something special in both the historic and contemporary works.

A distinct lack of directions inadvertently leads the visitor on an art treasure-hunt within the Walker’s historical displays. There is, however, a map to direct you to the second strand of the exhibition, hosted by independent artist-led space The Royal Standard, which explores alternative narratives around existing objects, archives and collections. It has a multiplex cinema feel; entering a large, darkened room, you’re bombarded with noise from all films simultaneously until you decide where to focus your attention. Simon Martin’s video Carlton closely scrutinises a wacky 1980s room divider – an analysis that later develops to decipher the work's underlying connections to art and society. Although a different narrative angle on the Walker’s delicate interventions, the selected films maintain the desire to source new and alternative meanings. [Emma Sumner]