RPS Awards Talks... Melanie Manchot with John Slyce

London-based artist Melanie Manchot HonFRPS employs photography, film, video and sound to form a sustained enquiry into notions of individual and collective identities. Performance-to-camera, reconstruction and participation as well as location-based research are recurring methodologies. Photographic and moving-image works operate across documentary and staged events to investigate how fact, fiction, narrative and observation offer strategies for speaking about our shifting place in an increasingly mediated world. Manchot is currently in production for her first feature film, commissioned by Liverpool Biennial.

John Slyce is a writer and critic based in London. He works through producing writing and criticism with a specialist interest in art, language and sign. John read modern history and politics at the University of Florida, languages and history at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and history and critical theory at the University of Michigan. John has written on contemporary art and culture while living in London since 1996 and has kept contact with Melanie Manchot and her work for nearly as long.

John and Melanie will discuss some of Melanie’s recent and current work-in-progress, in particular a series of photographs started during the pandemic and her feature film for which the main production has been completed over the summer. In this context they will discuss wider questions that are of interest to both - such as the complex relationship between photography and moving image, performativity, portraiture and processes of relational and situated image making.