Art Talks: Melanie Manchot
- 2 July 2015, 6pm
- DACS Foundation 33 Old Bethnal Green Road London E2 6AA
12 Addictions to the Cinematic Imaginary
To launch a new series of artist talks programmed by the DACS , the artist Melanie Manchot presented her latest project, Twelve - a major multi-channel video installation exploring the intimate stories, rituals, repetitions, and ruptures of lives spent in addiction and recovery.
She talked about the inspiration behind Twelve as well as the challenges arising from the relations between ethics and aesthetics in her work.
Over the previous two years, Manchot 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 final works.
Inspired by the visual acuity of renowned contemporary filmmakers, Twelve connects and collapses individual recollections in which everyday situations, events and activities are rendered dramatic or abstract and infused with tragedy, pathos and humour.
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 and is financially supported by Small Arts Awards from the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England through the National Lottery.
About the artist
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 showing at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester until 1 November 2015, before touring nationally throughout 2016.
