#34: Melanie Manchot

Melanie Manchot’s practice employs photography, video and film to explore performative situations, often looking at the individual in relation to cultural and social conditions as well as to public space. Situated at the threshold between the documentary and staged events the work frequently involves the participation of strangers and articulates modes of individual and collective experiences and relations.

Melanie Manchot presents:

Celebration (Cyprus Street), 2010, 10:50 min
Dance (All Night, Paris), 2011, 12:40 min
Perfect Mountain, 2011, 9:30 min
Leap after The Great Ecstasy, 2011, 20:10 min

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is one continuous tracking shot through an East London street party culminating in a durational group portrait of all the residents. For Dance (All Night, Paris) Manchot worked with amateur dancers from ten different forms of dance, bringing them together in one night time Parisian square. Both Perfect Mountain and Leap after The Great Ecstasy are filmed in the same alpine village, Engelberg, where Manchot is working on an extended body of work. Both works look at the relation between the natural and artifice in our human search for a brief moment of perfection. The artist is attending.

Melanie Manchot (b. 1966 in Witten, Germany) lives and works in London. She studied at New York University and at City University, London, before attending the Royal College of Art, London, where she completed her MA in Fine Arts in 1992. Since then she has held various teaching positions at art colleges across the UK, such as: Goldsmith College; University of London, England; New York University; London Photography Programme, London, England; London College of Printing, England (MA & BA). She frequently gives papers and artist’s presentations at conferences internationally. Her work has focused increasingly on investigating extended notions of portraiture through photography and video. Throughout her distinct projects she uses performative strategies to set up scenarios and situations into which her subjects are invited. Manchot has a particular interest in gestures that have the capacity to reveal her subjects subtley and build up a layered portrait that goes beyond the representation of appearances.

Melanie Manchot’s web site: www.melaniemanchot.net