Melanie Manchot - Twelve
Date uploaded: February 4, 2015
'Twelve' is Melanie Manchot’s major new multi channel video installation exploring the intimate stories, rituals, repetitions and ruptures of lives spent in addiction and recovery. Inspired by the visual acuity of renowned contemporary filmmakers, the work connects and collapses individual recollections in which everyday situations, events and activities are rendered dramatic or abstract and infused with tragedy, pathos and humour.
Over the last two years Manchot has worked in dialogue with twelve people in recent recovery from substance misuse, in rehabilitation communities in Liverpool, Oxford and London. Twelve is directly informed by their personal written and oral testimonies, creative conceptions, and performances within the final works.
Single sequences are shot as continuous takes, referencing iconic scenes from the films of Michael Haneke, Gus van Sant, Bela Tarr and Chantal Akerman - a ferry journey across the Mersey, a darkened room looking out on to an early morning street, a car wash, the cutting of daisies with small scissors, the obsessive cleaning of a floor – providing the framework for reflections on remembered incidents and states of mind. Twelve employs a diversity of cinematic technique and tropes adapted by Manchot to reveal the complex and non-linear nature of recovery.
Dates and Venues
- Peckham Platform, London, 22nd of May to the 26th of July 2015
- Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 18th of September to the 1st of November 2015
- Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, 23rd of January to the 20th March 2016
- Towner, Eastbourne, 16th of April to the 26th of June 2016
Melanie Manchot is a London based visual artist who works with photography, film, video and installation as part of a performative and participatory practice. Her projects often explore specific sites and public spaces in order to locate notions of individual and collective identities, investigating particular gestures and forms of movement or activities that become the marker of a group or community. Manchot’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries, museums and film festivals internationally including at Whitechapel Gallery and The Photographers’ Gallery, London; MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; GoMA, Glasgow; and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon.
Twelve was commissioned by Mark Prest of Portraits of Recovery and developed by Melanie Manchot working with Action on Addiction, the Ley Community and the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire. Twelve is financially supported by Small Arts Awards from the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England through the National Lottery. An edited version of Twelve features in Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age at FACT, Liverpool, 5 March – 17 May 2015.
For further information please contact Janette Scott Arts PR on [email protected] or +44(0)7966 486156.
For more information about the project click here.
