Performed only once, Apples and Other Fruit is a live art performance in HOME’s gallery space presided over by high-wire avant-guardian and force of nature, David Hoyle, in collaboration with artist and makers Jackie Haynes, Another Adele, Justin Freeman and Greg Thorpe. This will be a night of laughter and bravery exploring non-linear journeys through recovery from substance use within the LGBT+ community and beyond. It’s anything but dry.
In the spirit of The Recoverist Manifesto, through poetry, performance, film, live art and installation, this encounter creates a frame for the traces of lived experience — thoughtful, angry and beautiful. Arrived at through a process of nomadic art making with ideas generated via trips to Southport, Platt Hall Gallery of Costume Gallery and Manchester’s Gay Village, a group of artists Recoverists and makers came together to confront the existing narratives of recovery and ask “what lies beyond?”.
50 years since the partial decriminalisation of Homosexuality, LGBT+ people are still at risk of criminalisation and a loss of freedom. The rising and current phenomenon of chemsex is a visible symptom of the underlying trauma. It’s time to act by ‘outing’ the community use of substance as far from the recreational norm. It’s time for transcendence, healthier forms of hedonism and alternatives to a greater social connectedness.
We want to tell a story, shine a light, blow away the myths and be proud. We want to generate new cultural possibilities for the emancipatory re-framing of addiction and recovery identities towards a truer collective freedom.
Apples and Other Fruit is a part of UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities. A Portraits of Recovery project curated by Mark Prest and part of three visual and performance art commissions that explore the viability and desire for Greater Manchester, LGBT+, Disability and South Asian recovery communities to become more visible and better understood.
UNSEEN is delivered in partnership with the projects academic lead, visual anthropologist, Professor Amanda Ravetz from the Manchester School of Art at MMU.
UNSEEN is financially supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Cultural Capital Exchange – Exchange Programme and SUPERBIA, supporting LGBT+ cultural events as part of Manchester Pride’s commitment to cultural events happening all year round across Greater Manchester.
Portraits of Recovery are a Manchester based, international visual arts charity. Founded in 2011 by Mark Prest, the organisation’s work supports people and communities affected by and in recovery from substance use to open up new ways of knowing and looking at the subject by working with contemporary visual art and artists.
