Manchester International Festival 2015

World Premiéres and Special Events
Eighteen Extraordinary Days. 2 – 19 July 2015

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DOUGLAS GORDON, HÈLÉNE GRIMAUD AND CHARLOTTE RAMPLING COLLABORATE ON A GROUNDBREAKING NEW VISUAL ART, MUSIC AND THEATRE PRODUCTION NECK OF THE WOODS

MIF has invited Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon (Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno) and celebrated pianist Hélène Grimaud to create Neck of the Woods, a portrait of the wolf brought to life in a startling collision of visual art, music and theatre. On the stage of HOME’s intimate new theatre, legendary actor Charlotte Rampling (The Night Porter, Broadchurch) will recite and perform the story of the wolf as never before. Grimaud will curate and perform a series of works for piano, while Gordon will create the visual world. They have collaborated with Rampling and New York- based novelist and playwright Veronica Gonzalez Peña, weaving together stories, music, motifs, phrases and fragments to build this lyrical and beguiling work. In a new partnership to support their ongoing creative development, the Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir, first formed for MIF13, will perform as part of the soundscape to the production. Veronica Gonzalez Peña is author of the critically acclaimed novels Twin Time: or, how death befell me, and The Sad Passions, both published by semiotext(e). Her short stories have been widely published and anthologised. Gonzalez Peña is also founder of rockypoint press, a series of artist-writer collaborations, including prints, a reading series, and films. Her pamphlet So Far From God, a study of the Mexican drug war, was written for the semiotext(e) exhibition in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. British conceptual artist Douglas Gordon has received countless accolades for his work including the Turner Prize, the Premio 2000 (La Biennale di Venezia), the Hugo Boss Prize (Guggenheim Museum), the Roswitha Haftmann Prize (Kunsthaus Zürich), and the KätheKollwitz Prize (Akademie der Künste). Gordon has exhibited internationally, with major exhibitions including 24 Hour Psycho, Timeline at The Museum of Modern Art (New York) which also travelled to MALBA Colección Costantini (Buenos Aires), Pretty much every word written, spoken, heard, overheard from 1989… at the MART (Italy), Superhumanatural at the National Galleries of Scotland, Between Darkness and Light: Works 1989–2007 at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany), and Blood, Sweat, Tears at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art (Prague) and Tate Britain. Gordon has also exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona), Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, as well as many other galleries worldwide. On screen, his work includes Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, k.364 and Henry Rebel: Drawing and Burning.