The other side of our ethos was the questions around public space, who is allowed to use it and for what. UK is notorious for having a lot of private land amidst the city centers and most every where, spotted around the public parks and footpaths. In preparation to the event, we tried to get permits for every performance and in this mission, the biggest hurdle seemed to be the council on how to use public space; some areas of the city centre are not permitted for people to use for events like this, for security reasons. Piccadilly Gardens is heavily policed and so instead of art or citizens activities, the town centre is a place of surveillance. Other areas can only be booked if they are paid for and the smallest structure requires insurance which pricing starts at 1700£. Leafleting needs a printed materials distribution permit unless you are a charitable, political or a religious organization.
As you might have guessed, we did not get all our permits. Either because we could not pay for it or because we couldn’t find our way through the kafkaesque bureaucracy in time.
We informed all the artists of these rogue elements and for some, the day involved some negotiating with private security companies and the police. Everybody got to present their performances in full even though Kun Fang and Youngsook Choi had to move to a new location but in the case of Maria Orengo, the security guards took part in her performance by writing on a post-it note. Thank you for all our artists for being flexible and adventures! Based on our conversations in the evening’s shindig at the Soup Kitchen, the interactions with the public and even being moved seemed to add a lot to the work and was not entirely a bad thing when one is sensitive and quick to readjust the work based on the surrounding reactions. Less control, more improvisation. For many of the artists, this was their first time performing outside in the streets and happily, the experience seemed to get them curious for more.
The performances seemed to arouse the curiosity of locals if social media feeds can be taken as an indication; The most common question was simply, what is this? The most interesting comments and questions by far where the critical questions and views on the works. Personally, I would like to say a special thank you to Dave the Rave from Picadilly Rats, who with his friends who wanted to stay anonymous, posed the most challenging questions on Tim Knights piece “This home has a heartbeat”. It is vital for artists to consider the ethics of their work where the line between social commentary and raising awareness for social issues gets blurred by the risk of appropriating someone else’s struggle or advancing one’s own career by showing light on people in vulnerable positions. There are no easy answers when boundaries are searched and pushed. Homelessness is a massive issue not only in Manchester but in the whole UK, and as a squatter and as a part of Tape Moderns practicalities (functioning in occupied properties and public space), we touch on it very often. The right for housing, in our eyes, is a human right. I am grateful that the Market Street rough sleepers came to say their piece about how they viewed the art that directly commented on their precarious situations.

Once again, thank you to all our artists John Carney, Youngsook Choi, Claire Doyle, Kun Fang, Amy Guilfoyle, Tim Knight, Maria Orengo and Jade Williams. Thank you to all our volunteering squatters for legal aid and expertise in dealing with the autorities, thanks to all our documentors and thank you to the memberrs of the public who came to engage with the art and the artists.

A collaboration between Scaffold Gallery and Tape Modern presents, Allure of Sorts.
We are holding a one one-day performance festival where performances will ripple across Manchester city centre. We invite the use of architecture, history, the cityscape and relation with the social landscape of activity. This project was born out of a need to be within life, to not be exclusive.

The event will probe on the uselessness but essentiality of art and what is the accepted use of public space; What is space and how do we occupy it? Is the white box tired? How does performance art operate in public space? Our largest pool of witnesses will be the people passing by or stopping to share the space with us and to wonder, what it is that they are actually seeing.

The artists involved will explore a variety of themes including social history, absurdity and homelessness.

Featuring new performances by

John Carney
www.johncarneyart.com

Youngsook Choi
www.youngsookchoi.com

Claire Doyle
www.clairedoyleart.com

发自我的华为手机 (Kun Fang)
www.kunfang.be

Amy Guilfoyle
www.facebook.com/AGEconceptualartist

Stefan Klein
www.stefanklein.org/

Tim Knight
www.timknight.live

Maria Orengo
www.mimi3901.com/mjamorengo

Katie Shevlin
www.katieshevlin.co.uk

Jade Williams
www.instagram.com/dance_or_die_with_jade

Free event
Follow @allureofsorts #allureofsorts on Instagram and Facebook.
Find our Facebook event here. Keep an eye out on it for we will be posting a map with all the perfromance locations and times within the next few days.

I know this may sound ridiculous, after so long and it is not even the person you know best who will be writing this post. Do not threat, the lovely Enne has something up her sleeve that will quite amaze you pretty soon! But for now, hello, my stranger friends! Although you may not know me through writing, I am the other half of Tape Modern the Moffa in enne&moffa.
Throughout these months of virtual inactivity on the media platforms of Tape Modern, we have been actually very busy with our dyad enne&moffa, who have been off gallivanting with various projects that have taken us as far as Asia and to the very convoluted and alienating world of social media chats. The two worlds that we recently had the privilege of being part of are a beautiful juxtaposition to each other; first we had the pettiness of a first world lifestyle, where people get in a fuss over ‘#firstworldproblems’ and the other, our trip to Bangladesh that put the realities of life’s struggles into perspective.
Late last year we started working on making happenings within Manchester. Happenings come from the ordinary, modified to reveal the absurdity of everyday life and placed back within an ordinary setting. The term was first created by the great Allan Kaprow in the 1960s, meaning something slightly different, but the concept feels just as relevant today so we created our own spin of it to appreciate the tradition. In a sense, we are reusing this form of art-making as a means to ask questions both from our performance practice and from the audience that has no restrictions on the context in which they see these happenings on the streets during their daily life routines. Happenings are also a form of experimentation and an active “sketchbook” for our performance practice and I believe they are born through the necessities of young energetic artists and from the more obscure and illogical parts of our brain.

‘the cashier only allowed us 24 jars’ (Two bodies covered in jam, a camper battery, a power inverter, toaster and toast. 11 am busy street) was the happening that spurred the most interest from people and the media. I don’t want to sound naive or stereotypical, but it seems that in our artistic mindset of creation, we seem to often end up in some kind of enne&moffa bubble that seems to perceive the world quite differently to the rest of the world. This includes not necessarily realising how big an effect this happening might have. Neither one of us is big on social media but now we really got inducted on how quickly news can spread. The variety of people’s comments ranged from extremely funny, witty, interesting and insightful to critical, abusing and intolerant. Experiencing a social media audience and the police was a fascinating new way in which our work was viewed. Within the online comments, there were many puns and innuendos about jam tarts, but by far the funniest was the ‘don’t waste food’ -criticisers while we were sitting right in front of a multinational supermarket store. Other comments were instead, thought-provoking, such as comments on our gender, pointing out that if we had been males the reaction and the underlying meanings of the happening would be very different. ‘the cashier only allowed us 24 jars’ achieved exactly what we were hoping for with the happenings and more. We were allowed into thousands of viewers opinions on an action that could or could not be considered art depending on who you asked. Many of the more offensive comments were deleted by what I assume are Facebook filters, the news articles are out there in the virtual space with the remaining comments if you wish to read them. An impressive thing about this happening was perhaps the level of shock that people expressed online compared to the audience who was actually present on Market Street, they were happily interacting with us and filming us. This community is so normalised to the atrocities that are happening all over the world to people, children and the planet, yet a little nudity takes what happened on a sunny day in autumn on Market St. up to the 8th most read article on the BBC. I can only imagine this is because it is in reach to have a say about what happened on Market St. whilst most news and politics is quite alienating.
Between this time and heading to Bangladesh we had a lot of interest from different media organisations, a few interviews, a contact from a reality TV show and a lovely exhibition in Manchester that deserves a mention for I believe the performance we did was one of our best; ‘power’ and I’ll explain why later on.

Our trip to Bangladesh sprouted from my deep-rooted love for Asia, I have worked in a few countries in South East Asia and thought it was time to explore South Asia, this time bringing my other artist half with me. We were accepted into the Dhaka Live Art Biennale and the Chittagong Open Art Biennale in February with a work called ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that contemplated various aspects of waiting and the 21 st century culture of waiting. There we also worked with an LGBTQ+ film production group ‘Epiphania’ which invited us to do a work for a private event in the Goethe Institute in support and education of the LGBTQ+ community of Bangladesh for a small selected group of more open-minded people. For them, we performed ‘tähteinvälinen’ (don’t worry I hardly can say the title either).

I won’t go too much into the works we performed there, as you may know, we don’t believe in our works being explained but rather be the means for thinking, questioning and conversations. Working in Bangladesh was a great eye-opener, not only in terms of life conditions and attitudes but also on an artistic level, being there gave us the ability to almost put our works on a measuring scale of powerfulness, and by power, I intend more an emotional, empathetic and universal language power. I am not going to distinguish myself from the complainers and the pettiness of some aspects of the western culture, I am right in there with most of you. But working there, while it was maybe not the most successfully organised biennale that we could have hoped for, it made me realise that working within these kinds of countries forces your work to speak of a much deeper human condition than previously, because there, your work is trying to reach people who have the basic priorities of life to concentrate on firstly, a struggle that has less space to indulge egotistic visual nonsense. If your work can speak there, you have achieved a little more balance on that measuring scale. I mentioned earlier that before leaving, enne&moffa did a work called ‘power’, this was a deeply personal work but as we later found out, it was deeply personal to most. The work considered laughter, the darker, depersonalising and instrumental laughter that comes from a form of defence mechanisms. Many of our works were ostracised straight out, due to the nudity factor, by many people in Bangladesh. Both for cultural reasons and for the true fact that they do not see nudity with the frequency the west does, however ‘power’ received an amazing amount of consideration and conversation openers from the most unusual people, woman and men. This led me to believe that on this imaginary weighing machine, one of our works had managed to definitely pull up the heavy weight of the other side, representing the sensitivities of all, independently from their geographical position.

Now we are finally both back in the UK, I say finally because I took a long detour instead of returning with Enne after the biennales. We are now boosted for energy, experience and widened our perspectives of the realities in which the world is floating in. On a human level, I think what was striking about this trip, seen from an outsiders perspective of course, was the different philosophy of life there. There seemed to be more love, more happiness and more smiles shared in a community that has much greater differences and not even comparable sized problems and restrictions to ours. They are looking at the west as an ‘ideological’ capitalist utopia, although we perhaps have more to learn from them seeing the division that is sprouting within the western countries in the last years and hopefully they will find a more sustainable way to achieve the comforts we take for granted here.
Coming soon: As I mentioned, Enne has something quite exciting up her sleeve, that I believe will be shared with you fairly soon. In the meantime, together with Scaffold Gallery, Tape Modern has organised a public performance event in Manchester on the 11th of July, Allure of Sorts. You can find more info on this on the Facebook event page here and you are very welcome to join us for a day of performance art!

Before we move on to transforming the space back to an artist studio, there’s still a few things about the show we would like to share with you:

Last Friday we had a small event at the gallery: altercation by enne&moffa was performed for the second and last time. We had a small but a lovely crowd to experience the work and the wine with us. I don’t usually repeat a performance so it was an interesting and new experience for me as well. It was lovely to hear the thoughts of our gallery visitors and by the sounds of it, people enjoyed the experience.

So that’s a wrap. Life at the studio will continue as usual. We decided to close the show early due to an expected eviction, but it looks like we get to stay at least a bit longer. Since we never know how long we get to stay and where, we won’t give any promises of the time or location of our next exhibition, but I can promise this: It will happen. Before that though, we are looking forward to our series of public place performances taking place all over Manchester. We’ll keep you posted.

Here are a few pictures from Friday and a documentation video of altercation from the preview. Thank you to SB Cooper Films for the footage.

See the documentation video on Vimeo

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

[See image gallery at tapemodern.org]

I am very excited about this exhibition! It will be the first one we do with our new space, the artists we have lined up are interesting and I love the works we’ll have the privilege to show.

Naturally, we need to keep in mind that we might be evicted at any point. We have plans in place of how to get all the works safely to the next building and how to keep the ball rolling if this would happen. Because of this, we are doing this on a very tight schedule, hoping that we get to stay in this building for the whole duration of the show. Of course, I wish that we could stay for a long time since we have finally got it to run smoothly and I am utterly in love with the space.

But without further a do, let me introduce our artists:

Nicola Ellis
www.nicolaellis.com/context/

Nicola Ellis (b.1987, St Helens) currently lives and works in Manchester. She studied BA hons Fine Art at The University of Central Lancashire and following this, completed an MA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art. In recent years she has undertaken research projects including Sculpture: A Fabrication(2017), which focused on the mechanics of large scale sculptural commissioning, and Play/Pause: the turbulent history of UK steel (2016). She is currently undertaking an open door residency at ACA and The North Pennines Observatory. She is also doing a placement in manufacturing in order to produce a commission for The National Festival of Making in Blackburn. Her work recently featured in exhibitions including; From A to C, this being B. Caustic Coastal, Salford. Da Vinci Engineered, Zebedees Yard, Hull; It’ll Hold Until It Breaks (solo exhibition), Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough; More room for error (touring solo exhibition), Arcadecardiff, Cardiff, &Model Gallery, Leeds & Bloc Projects, Sheffield; You won’t see that bit anyway (solo exhibition), 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, UK; Head to Head: Nicola Ellis and Aura Satz, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK; Part of the Programme, FAFA Gallery, Helsinki; and Cabedal, Plataforma Revolver, Lisbon. 

Riikka Enne
www.riikkaenne.com

Riikka Enne (b. 1990, Tampere) lives and works in Manchester. She studied her BA in Fine Art in Tampere School of Art (2014) and continued to her MFA in Manchester School of Art (2016). Enne works in sculpture and performance: Her work examines the gap between an individual’s experience and the tensions of society through found objects seen as revealing residue of human life, concentrating on materiality and restrictions. Recently she exhibited in Disponere, 5th Base Gallery, London; Femfest, Tanner Street, London and Pittsburgh Performance Festival (PGHPAF), Pittsburgh; Emergency Break Glass, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester. Most recently her work has been visible as public space performances across Manchester. 

Matt Girling
www.mattgirlingartist.tumblr.com
www.instagram.com/subsurfacepondwater/

Mutabase
www.mutabase.net/
www.mutabase.bandcamp.com/releases

Review by silent radio: “With Strange Friends off the stage, the next act to wow us is Mutabase, she is incredible! I would say she is a performance artist in her own right and she captures the crowd with her haunting voice and impressive songs. She completely owns the stage, and calls herself a “DIY electro punk rocker.” With a few gigs already under her belt it seems today is the biggest one to date which is hard to believe. I can see Cristi becoming a big star and I would buy tickets to her next gig in a heartbeat.”

Sophia Moffa
www.sophiamoffa.com/

Sophia Moffa (b. 1994 Rome) is interested in the relations and tensions between the body, and the socio-political and technological events surrounding society. Initially working intuitively, experimenting and negotiating within her settings and materials, her works question topics surrounding existentialism, the human condition and modern ethics. She mainly works in performance, video and sculpture to materialize the concepts, and has exhibited in the UK, Italy, Singapore and Egypt.

Willow Rowlands
www.willowrowlands.com