Manchester International Festival: Art as Experience

Since its inception in 2007, Manchester International Festival (MIF) has challenged visitors’ assumptions about the nature of art through innovative programming. Now in its fourth cycle, the biennial event is still providing fresh and challenging cultural experiences, with many of this year’s art offerings continuing a now well-established theme of breaking down barriers between artist and viewer.

One of the hidden gems of the festival is Long Grass (12 – 14 and 19 – 21 July), a theatrical video installation by Belgian director Inne Goris taking place in the round in the Grand Hall of Manchester Town Hall. Long Grass places the audience in the middle of the action as the story unfolds on four video screens, asking viewers to imagine themselves in the place of child soldiers and think about the difficult choices people are called upon to make at different times in their lives.

“Running through my work is a preoccupation with the thin line between being a victim and a perpetrator, and how quickly that can change,” Goris explains. “I was intrigued by child soldiers as they are both victims and perpetrators, and it is interesting to find both roles in the same person, especially among such young children. With Long Grass, I wanted to show how children as young as seven and eight have to make difficult, unthinkable decisions.”

Goris worked with white Belgian children to bring the subject matter closer to home, filming Long Grass with a group of young people aged between eight and 23. “I wanted to say that it can happen to anyone,” she elucidates. “Everyone under certain circumstances can do the same thing.”

While the piece delves into a dark, cruel world, it also aims to find connections between the stories of child soldiers and the audience’s own experiences. “Child soldiers go through so many things we don’t even think about experiencing, such as hunger and cold, but there are things we all have in common, such as the desire to have a home, a place where we are safe,” Goris points out. Starkly juxtaposing harsh images with the pure, angelic voices of a children’s choir, the installation grows around the audience, requiring the viewer to use their imagination and construct their own story connecting snippets of the narrative.

This year, MIF has made an extra effort to expand its catalogue of unusual venues, many of which are usually off-limits to the public – from Mayfield Depot, a ghostly former train station, to a half-built gallery extension at Whitworth Art Gallery. Tino Sehgal, who is best known for works that rely upon subtle and sometimes uncomfortable interactions between performers and members of the audience, is transforming the vast, semi-derelict space of Mayfield station into a pulsating sensory landscape for his immersive installation This Variation (12 – 20 July). Also at Mayfield, conceptual artist Dan Graham’s piece Past Future Split Attention (13 – 17 July) plays with the concepts of past and future, creating a ‘feedback-feedahead-loop’ from the interaction of two performers; choreographer Mette Ingvartsen invites visitors to experience Evaporated Landscapes (15 – 16 July), an artificial dance of light, sound and bubbles, and artist Mårten Spångberg will create Epic (18 – 20 July), a mise-en-scène for nine dancers.

Elsewhere, India’s Nikhil Chopra is the first artist to make use of the new Landscape Gallery, currently being built at the Whitworth Art Gallery, with Coal on Cotton (5 & 7 July), a gruelling, 65-hour sunrise to sunset performance drawing on Manchester’s heritage. Using the contrasting materials of coal and cotton – the fuel and the product of the Industrial Revolution, which transformed Manchester in the 19th century – Chopra is constructing a new environment under the gaze of an ever-changing audience.

Finally, at Manchester Art Gallery, group show do it 20 13 (5 – 21 July), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, is based on a series of instructions written by a star-studded array of artists, including Ai Weiwei and Ryan Trecartin. Ranging from the meaningful and philosophical to the satirical and absurd, the results show that art – rather like a festival – can be many things, from expressive and provocative to celebratory.

Manchester International Festival: Art as Experience

Since its inception in 2007, Manchester International Festival (MIF) has challenged visitors’ assumptions about the nature of art through innovative programming. Now in its fourth cycle, the biennial event is still providing fresh and challenging cultural experiences, with many of this year’s art offerings continuing a now well-established theme of breaking down barriers between artist and viewer.

One of the hidden gems of the festival is Long Grass (12 – 14 and 19 – 21 July), a theatrical video installation by Belgian director Inne Goris taking place in the round in the Grand Hall of Manchester Town Hall. Long Grass places the audience in the middle of the action as the story unfolds on four video screens, asking viewers to imagine themselves in the place of child soldiers and think about the difficult choices people are called upon to make at different times in their lives.

“Running through my work is a preoccupation with the thin line between being a victim and a perpetrator, and how quickly that can change,” Goris explains. “I was intrigued by child soldiers as they are both victims and perpetrators, and it is interesting to find both roles in the same person, especially among such young children. With Long Grass, I wanted to show how children as young as seven and eight have to make difficult, unthinkable decisions.”

Goris worked with white Belgian children to bring the subject matter closer to home, filming Long Grass with a group of young people aged between eight and 23. “I wanted to say that it can happen to anyone,” she elucidates. “Everyone under certain circumstances can do the same thing.”

While the piece delves into a dark, cruel world, it also aims to find connections between the stories of child soldiers and the audience’s own experiences. “Child soldiers go through so many things we don’t even think about experiencing, such as hunger and cold, but there are things we all have in common, such as the desire to have a home, a place where we are safe,” Goris points out. Starkly juxtaposing harsh images with the pure, angelic voices of a children’s choir, the installation grows around the audience, requiring the viewer to use their imagination and construct their own story connecting snippets of the narrative.

This year, MIF has made an extra effort to expand its catalogue of unusual venues, many of which are usually off-limits to the public – from Mayfield Depot, a ghostly former train station, to a half-built gallery extension at Whitworth Art Gallery. Tino Sehgal, who is best known for works that rely upon subtle and sometimes uncomfortable interactions between performers and members of the audience, is transforming the vast, semi-derelict space of Mayfield station into a pulsating sensory landscape for his immersive installation This Variation (12 – 20 July). Also at Mayfield, conceptual artist Dan Graham’s piece Past Future Split Attention (13 – 17 July) plays with the concepts of past and future, creating a ‘feedback-feedahead-loop’ from the interaction of two performers; choreographer Mette Ingvartsen invites visitors to experience Evaporated Landscapes (15 – 16 July), an artificial dance of light, sound and bubbles, and artist Mårten Spångberg will create Epic (18 – 20 July), a mise-en-scène for nine dancers.

Elsewhere, India’s Nikhil Chopra is the first artist to make use of the new Landscape Gallery, currently being built at the Whitworth Art Gallery, with Coal on Cotton (5 & 7 July), a gruelling, 65-hour sunrise to sunset performance drawing on Manchester’s heritage. Using the contrasting materials of coal and cotton – the fuel and the product of the Industrial Revolution, which transformed Manchester in the 19th century – Chopra is constructing a new environment under the gaze of an ever-changing audience.

Finally, at Manchester Art Gallery, group show do it 20 13 (5 – 21 July), curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, is based on a series of instructions written by a star-studded array of artists, including Ai Weiwei and Ryan Trecartin. Ranging from the meaningful and philosophical to the satirical and absurd, the results show that art – rather like a festival – can be many things, from expressive and provocative to celebratory.