SCRATCH NIGHTS X GALLERIES TAKEOVER
Sat 12 Nov 2022
Lowry’s Scratch Nights returned with a very special collaboration with our Galleries team!
Four artists whose work overlaps live performance, visual and media art took over our gallery spaces with 20mins performances and longer durational work across the evening:
THE GHOST SWAP by Clodagh Chapman & James Varney
INTO THE WALL by Malik Jama
BRUISE PRELUDE by Beth Kettle
WEB WIDE WORLD by John Powell-John
and
a new performance by Manchester based company Night People who rounded of the evening with a brand-new performance inviting audiences to experience their signature blend of fierce dance, immersive theatre, interactive audio-visual performance & electronic music.
Photo credits: Sonya Smith Photography
THE GHOST SWAP
By Clodagh Chapman & James Varney
A bric-a-brac stall with a difference: ghosts.
There are more ghosts among us than you might expect. We have assembled a small collection, and invite you to meet and trade your own. Bring your interesting and unwanted objects, and we will adopt them and help you discover the ghosts within.
About Clodagh Chapman & James Varney
Clodagh Chapman is a Manchester-based writer and theatre maker. Her work includes butterfly (VAULT Festival), dubbed “a brilliant show full of heart” [Guardian], plus projects with Camden People’s Theatre and Barrel Organ. Currently, she’s currently co-directing LOB (Contact Theatre). In film, her debut short has made the Official Selection of BAFTA-qualifying film festivals worldwide. Her work explores queerness, history and authorship - often via tonally-inappropriate confetti canons. She currently facilitates for the Royal Exchange and The Lowry, and has previously delivered participation projects at Chickenshed and the Royal Albert Hall.
James Varney is a writer and theatre maker based in Manchester, making work about cities with and for the people who live in them. He has delivered work for the Royal Exchange, Manchester International Festival, and Manchester Literature Festival and is currently developing participatory project 'We Live Here' as part of Contact’s Future Fires programme. He finds other people far more interesting than himself and through artistic collaboration and community-engaged practice uses writing, drawing, and theatre to imagine the world we want to live in.
@CloChpmn / https://clodaghchapman.co.uk/
@mrjvarney / http://www.jamesvarney.uk/
INTO THE WALL
By Malik Jama
An installation of sound, light, colour and photography in motion, brought to life by projection mapping around structures and barriers on the floor and walls. Malik will use the architecture and watery surroundings of the Quays to build a disorientating and multi layered immersive space. The soundscape will be rooted in recordings from around Hulme and The Quays.
About Malik Jama
Malik Jama is an artist based at Venture Arts in Hulme, Manchester. His practice focuses on digitally manipulating photography and film. Malik’s projection mapping is ambitious and he loves to work with light and motion on large-scale murals.
Malik was commissioned by LAC Collective to create a bespoke projection-mapping piece for Soup Kitchen, transforming the basement walls with light and photographic collage, mapped perfectly to the industrial fittings of the space.
Malik’s passion for photography focuses mainly on architecture and industry as well of bodies of water. He transforms original images into a dystopian and hallucinatory world of colour, using motifs from disaster movies, heavy with sci-fi feeling and hypnotic rhythm.
venturearts.org/artists/malik-jama
https://twitter.com/VentureArts
https://www.facebook.com/VentureArtsManchester/
https://www.instagram.com/venturearts_/
BRUISE PRELUDE
By Beth Kettel
Bruise Prelude is a new performance bringing together movement with reactive materials in costume reflecting on the connections between psychological and physical experience. Through looking at emotional and physical defence mechanisms in human psychology, armour and defensive strategies in other species, the work continues wider exploration into interconnection, meaning-making, collisions of diverse interests, materials and narrative devices, ecology, perception, consciousness and mental health of humans, plants and animals.
About Beth Kettel
Based in Nottingham, UK
Beth Kettel’s work encompasses text, costume, sound, video and performance. Recent commissions include: Baseline Drift, a performance part of Art Night, London; A Mutual Influence, Green Man Festival, Wales; Art & Screen Network, ICA, London. Selected solo exhibitions & events include: Phoenix, Leicester; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden; THE END, TACO, London; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; MANTEL, Copperfield Gallery, London; Two Queens, Leicester; Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham; Full English, Curated by Dateagle, London; Cob Gallery, London; Caustic Coastal, Manchester; Jerwood Space, London.
Kettel was recently nominated for Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize and has had work featured in print & online publications such as Contemporary Art Society - Artist To Watch; This Is Tomorrow; Mousse Magazine; Dazed Digital.
Instagram: @bethkettel
WEB WIDE WORLD
By John Powell-Jones
A live interactive performance set in the growing Web Wide World adventure series. Developing the story set out in Web Wide World Volume 1 comic book and Volume 1.5 computer game.
The audience will join the central character, Atamur, as they embark on an adventure to try, and discover who they are and information about the alien world in which they have awoken.
About John Powell-Jones
John’s practice deals with themes of perception, power structures and personal reality, an ongoing exploration into how the warped western view of progress and success can act to inform our perception of morality. These ideas are explored through the use of speculative fiction and presented across various mediums including, video, performance, animation and comic books.
Taking inspiration from body and survival horror, European folklore and science fiction (specifically the cyberpunk sub genre). John aims to form a dialogue between our present and an imagined dystopian future in which the horrors of capitalism and neo-liberal ideology are presented as cyborgs and demons.
Recent shows: 2022: ‘Art et al. X Cromwell Place: Season One’, Group Show, Cromwell House, London. ‘The Alien Inside Us” Group Show, Anderson Contemporary, London. ‘Fayre Share Fayre’ Group Show, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. 2021: ‘Cyberjunk’, Solo Show, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; ‘Cyberjunk – Quantum Crash’, Solo Show, IMT Gallery, London; ‘Metabolic Market’, Group Show, Giant Gallery, Bournemouth; ‘This Is A Not Me’ 2020, Group Show, IMT Gallery, London/The Internet. 2020: ‘Other Transmissions’, Group Show, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; ‘Technotrash: The Fellowship of Technoid’, Solo performance, Holden Gallery, Manchester. 2019: ‘Here and How?’, Group Show, Motion Sickness Project Space, Cambridge; ‘Slime Of UR Life: Work Drinks’, Solo Show, Paradise Works, Salford; ‘Proforma Pavilion’, Group show and ten day residency, Corte Supernova, Venice; ‘Work Drinks’, Solo Installation, STOCK Gallery, Levenshulme; ‘Other Transmissions’, Group Show, an exhibition showcasing work made during the Conversations Series residency, TATE Liverpool, Artlink Hull.
@johnpowell_jones
johnpowell-jones.co.uk