Melanie Manchot. Twelve

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 12 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 grass with small scissors, the obsessive cleaning of a floor—providing the framework for reflections on remembered incidents and states of mind.

In the installation these elements are brought together to become an anthology of stories and gestures, situating the work between documentary and fiction. Narrative and performative strategies speak to the challenges of one’s sense of self, of transformation and the mutability of subjectivity.

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; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln (US), MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; GoMA, Glasgow; and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon.