Home, Manchester
After missing a year, the Manchester International Festival is back. Their main exhibition is a collection of poetry mingling with the visual arts, curated by poet, Lemn Sissay and art ‘guru’ Hans Ulrich Obrist. The conceit of mixing words with material art has a long tradition in contemporary Western art and not always successfully. My nature is to begin skeptically and to suppress any preconceptions I may have, not an easy task. Here, though, I was looking forward to this and not just because it felt like we are emerging from the shadows after a torrid eighteen months, I had faith that the solitude we all endured (not necessarily a negative) enabled artists and poets to cut out the noise that usually surrounds them and think more clearly. It’s not an unalloyed success but there is much to admire. Bellow are four exhibits I enjoyed.
The French-Caribbean artist, Julien Creuzet has made a poignant and profound video that utilises imagery, sound and words to great effect. It is narrated, or rather, sung by a disembodied head(s) that floats dreamlike on the screen like a Greek chorus telling the story of fire, of fog and the spirit of the diaspora. It’s a pertinent theme now.
The flower paintings of Precious Okoyomon, bright and with vibrant colours, really grab your attention, as though three-dimensional. The life-like flower heads are comic and sad equally, foreboding in one painting and shocked in another as though someone has creeped up behind them and pinched their bottoms, if they had one. No need for words here as they easily build a narrative just by look alone.
Though born in Nigeria and resident in London, Ihenua Ellams’ pen picture and written poem next to it smells to me of a very Manchester scene. With the rain, the squashed, depressed heads buried in the pavement either side of a twisting road, the high-rises behind and a bus floating in the air above. You could mistake it for Oxford Road. The poem next to the drawing could be a tale of any city-scape but lines like “The rain clouds will gather” and “Such beautiful sorrow”, speak of the northern Rainy City it’s inhabitants have grown to love/hate.
Vivienne Griffin’s digital/graphic film is a dystopian affair fronted by what the video gamer will know as a ‘first person shooter’: a hand pointing a machine gun. We are in a human unoccupied environment populated with large three dimensional words and objects, like candles. Sometimes the scene is devoid of anything as the gunner moves through the landscape, firing balls from the gun with a bad aim. Occasionally a ball hits an object but too far away to effect anything. The machine gun moves closer and a game (of sorts) commences as the shots begin to knock the object over. The whole thing is frustrating and seemingly pointless which may actually be the point, given the piece’s title. A fake environment for a fake culture? I haven’t a clue.
I may be a jaded, cynical atheist but I do believe that ‘spirit’ is something akin to self-consciousness, not a ghost in the sky or some unknowable entity directing our lives. If so, then there may be hope for us yet, though I doubt it.
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Kevin Nebula 