“3.15pm, School House.
Torches off. Cold, bright, quiet.” Jane Samuels 2007

Urban exploration. Squeezing through windows, abseiling from roofs and falling through floors into mans abandoned structures. A pursuit for urban thrill seekers, the criminal, the squatter. It is for those who seek a greater connection with the abandoned past, those who wish to exploit it, and those who seek to escape societies constraints within the places it has cast aside.

Artist and activist Jane Samuels makes performative interventions into abandoned buildings. Armed with ropes, torches, gloves and face masks (the uniform of the explorer, the activist and the criminal) she explores houses, lunatic asylums, hospitals and schools. With her she takes a human cast of “characters”, wearing costumes inspired by folklore and urban legend, and creates theatrical, often unsettling photographic images that respond to each sites suggested narratives. On each occasion the casts are comprised of differing social groups, e.g. a group of her fellow animal rights activists or a group of practicing Buddhists.

The act of exploration is potentially both compassionate and exploitative – it requires an empathic understanding of the environment and seeks to form a connection, yet the building is illegally violated and utilised, and others are implicated in the process. In this way she explores questions of morality, the dispossessed, legal boundaries and activism itself. Samuels operates at once as the objective activist and the subjective artist, challenging her own political passions through her artistic practice.

For further information please email jane.samuels@gmail.com.

“1.07pm Swimming Baths.
Torches on. Ceiling unsound. Black water.” Jane Samuels 2008

The entire exhibition will be displayed within the openspace (bar) Office foyer.

Opening times for the openspace (bar) are Wednesday to Friday from 5pm until at least 11pm and on Saturday from 6pm until at least midnight.

Outside of these weekday opening times the exhibition can also be viewed by appointment, please contact the Box Office on 0161 615 0500 for further details and to arrange a viewing.

*TRIP - Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives

Between June 19 and 21, 2008, TRIP brings together artists, academics, movers, shakers, do-ers and dissenters in a unique event combining an interdisciplinary conference with a citywide series of actions, interventions and exhibitions.

TRIP’s theme is psychogeography, and will explore many of the avenues this field of action, theory and research is currently entering, including neogeography, deep topography, urban intervention, locative media and collaborative mapping. TRIP enables the previously separate worlds of theory and practice to interact, initiating new approaches and energies, and furthering techniques to take on and alter the physical environment.

Beginning as a reaction to the industrial revolution, the re-imagining of the city by romantics, bohemians, and avant gardists evolved into a diverse range of strategies, practices and arguments, from the psychogeographic drift or derive to the artistic intervention. By the 1990s these were being utilised by artists, writers, activists, and historians, attempting to negotiate urban and rural space in the postmodern world.

But practices developed in the twentieth century encounter a different world in the twenty first - a more observed and policed world on the one hand, a more corporate, globally-connected world on the other. Increasingly the body, social, individual and political, is the site of contradictory demands - the demands to consume versus the demands of control.

TRIP’s artist-led events will take place throughout Manchester, in public spaces and leading galleries including greenroom and Urbis, with TRIP’s academic conference will be based at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Other TRIP events at greenroom

Wed 28th May, 8pm

Late Night Events Get Lost and TRIP Opening Event FREE

Thu 5th June to Tue 26th August

Exhibitions Psychogeographic Posters John Rooney & Pam Shaw : FREE

Thu 19th June, 2pm to 3pm

Performance Manchester, Mythogeography and Mobile Machinoeki Phil Smith : FREE : greenroom openspace*