TWELVE

Various Venues

by Melanie Manchot

Past Project

TWELVE commissioned by Portraits of Recovery was Melanie Manchot's major 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.

Venue

Various venues across the UK

Over two years, Manchot worked in dialogue with twelve people in recent recovery from substance use, 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.

The project references 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 techniques and tropes adapted by Manchot to reveal the complex and non-linear nature of recovery.

Melanie Manchot

Melanie's 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 is a Portraits of Recovery touring exhibition project, developed by Melanie Manchot working with Action on Addiction, the Ley Community and the Psychosocial Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire.

TWELVE was financially supported by Small Arts Awards from the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England through the National Lottery. An edited version of TWELVE featured in Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age at FACT, Liverpool, 5 March – 17 May 2015. Twelve was also part of the World Health Congress Europe (Manchester), which coincided with Mark Prest’s conference paper. PORe and the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester presented a single screen viewing of the work. Originally commissioned by PORe, after touring England in 2015/16, this multi-channel installation was also included in HOOKED at the Science Gallery London and toured to the Big Anxiety Festival in Sydney, Australia.