By breaking down and re-constituting spectators’ movement through her moving-image works, Melanie Manchot re-defines the social spaces that have historically excluded women.

Off the back of her first feature film, STEPHEN, premiering at Liverpool Biennal 2023, In Darkness and Light contextualises Manchot’s video practice with contemporaneous works that chart the German photographer’s skills in moving images. Many of the works are on show in the UK for the first time, creating a sprawling map of Manchot’s works that is just about within the bounds of accessibility that JHG provides visitors.

The exhibition is covers three galleries at JHG, to complement the stark differences in light and technology involved, as well as to give space for dissecting the works, particularly the feature film. The first is the biggest, containing the majority of the programme, with monitors spread unevenly throughout the dimly lit room, pushing rays of digital light in oblique directions. The boundless, structureless organisation of the exhibition mirrors the first film we see, Liquid Skin (2023). The short follows several women as they walk through and inhabit their workplaces, all of which are part of a hidden, nighttime economy—whether it’s in a factory or as a nurse.

The continual movement of these female workers breaks down the strictures of their workplaces and requires grounding, which we get through these women, creating an intimate portrait of women physically and culturally elided from the public eye. Manchot and the curators at JHG are careful to place the soundscape of these spaces inside a little viewing station, requiring us to take agency and move through the darkness to get the full picture.

The same is true of Golden Girls (also 2023) across the room, which also tracks an unseen economy, that of pole-dancers, but this time with a rotating camera that the women pop in and out of. Taking its name from the club in which it is shot, the film supposedly draws inspiration from Marlene Dumas’ 1995 painting The Visitor, which captures the labour of waiting in the prostitution business. Dumas is known for basing her paintings on various photographic referents from different parts of the world; what’s striking about the subjects of The Visitor, where we find truth when we can only see them from the back, is in their postures. For Manchot, the same seems to be true; as the camera turns slowly, we are left to sequence the gestures of the dancers, some of whom practice while some just wait, as they slowly enter and exit the frame.

The curation creates a certain distance from the subjects, evident in the need for headphones (both on a practical and a thematic level). As much as these are real lives, what Manchot seems to be trying to make clear is that they are distant, both in darkness and, as is the case here, in light. Some of the films, such as Skaters and Paternoster (also both 2023), are on CRT monitors, adding a sculptural quality to the works that consolidates this distance. Described as “footnotes” to Liquid Skin by JHG, they also help melt away the structures of the spaces they depict, as well as that of the gallery—it would take anyone a second or two to realise that the headphone mount for Skaters is actually hidden behind the monitor itself.

Structure and light are flipped in the next room, in which we see Line of Sight (2025) as well as Manchot’s ongoing photo series Inversions (The Alps). Seaside light rushes into this room, bouncing off the white walls and snowy settings of both works. Here, the structure of human machines, some of which are created, as we know, by female workers of this nighttime economy, bends at the will of light and weather, as frost covers the decommissioned telecommunications centre in the Engelsberg glacier, which forms the subject of Line of Sight. Are we seeing the breaking of the strictures that elide female nighttime workers, once they enter the light? Are these women now free? Manchot is almost definitely offering this up as a solution, the Inversions series reminiscent of feminist performance artworks, hinting at a liberation of body and identity.

Across the way, in JHG’s Barker-Mill Gallery, is STEPHEN. Though the film’s subject, a member of a Liverpool addiction support group who seeks personal transformation in a fictional character, is different from previous ones, the principle of boundary-breaking remains steadfast. In the entrance way to the screening room, we see more video sculptures of auditions, costume fittings and other “making of” tidbits that break down the communal, extra-textual qualities of the project before we’ve even seen it. Sure enough, these are addressed in the film itself, where the boundaries of fiction and documentary are blurred (many of the actors aren’t professional, but simply other members of the support group). What we are watching isn’t really a film, but a project intent on helping transform members of the group away from addiction and damaging mental health, recorded for the screen.

The exhibition is a curt, modest celebration of a brilliant artist at a major turning point in their career. Manchot is in the process of making two more feature films, and with the CV that this exhibition provides, it’s safe to say that the many boundaries produced by society are at major risk of the Manchot treatment.

Melanie Manchot: In Darkness and Light is on show at John Hansard Gallery until 9th May 2026. For more information, visit their website.

All images: Melanie Manchot, In Darkness and Light, installation view, John Hansard Gallery, 2026. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Reece Straw.