A Modest Show – review of A Modest Evening with Ruby Tingle at SOUP Manchester: Welcome Axel Obiger

Jo Manby

On 5 August 2022, PAPER in collaboration with No Such Thing Records staged A Modest Evening, part of A Modest Show, collateral programme to British Art Show 9, at SOUP Kitchen. The event was to welcome Berlin Mitte-based gallery, Axel Obiger, to Manchester on the occasion of their mini-residency and exhibition at PAPER Gallery and Paper2. Following is a review of this evening of free drinks, music and art, headlined by Ruby Tingle and Left Winter, to accompany the four-way interview with Axel Obiger artists Gabriele Künne, Nathalie Grenzhaeuser and Enrico Niemann.

One of the best things about A Modest Show, the collateral programme to the British Art Show 9, has been the combination of micro commissioning on the part of the AMS organisers, curator Nathaniel Pitt and producer Alex Zawadzki, and the programming of free one-off, two-off consumption-themed events.

Richard Shields performed The Emperors Nu Instagram and the Fall of The Artist Opera in May. Jane Lawson and Steve Hanson psychically purged bad experiences on paper for participants of the two-part Detox to Delish, from May to June. Foreign Investment ran The Incredible Re-Birth Dinner in July. On 2 and 3 September, The Grand Pear Supper is staged at Longsight Art Space (ticketed event). Events like these have maintained a lively, radical, creative crosscurrent that surged alongside A Modest Show’s equally vibrant exhibition programme.

A Modest Evening was no exception. Held at SOUP Manchester at the beginning of August, it was a collaboration between PAPER Gallery and No Such Thing Records, a night of free drinks, music and art, including new audio releases and performances, to welcome the Berlin based artists Gabriele Künne, Nathalie Grenzhaeuser and Enrico Niemann of Axel Obiger Gallery to Manchester, on the occasion of their mini residency and exhibition at PAPER.

An evening of swamp cocktails – filthy delicious Bloody Marys full of tabasco and vegetation – Ruby Tingle’s iridescent creased pink ballgown looking like a damselfly trailing through rough country – a summer thunderstorm of electrical streaming, lime green, yellow light and soaring beat-driven melody puncturing the shadowy darkness.

The three (of a current running total of nine) Axel Obiger artists, are interviewed here for the September issue of the Fourdrinier, and they explain in detail the set-up, rationale and collaborative programming behind the Axel Obiger Gallery project – as well as who Axel Obiger is and where the name comes from. Their exhibition title, Die Geduld des Papiers, roughly translates as The Patience of Paper, referring to the long-suffering medium that can be crumpled and pulped and torn apart and remade.

Tellingly, the project itself was supposed to go ahead pre-pandemic but was postponed several times over. In addition to that kind of waiting around, there were post-pandemic travel issues that meant that the visiting artists’ flights were cancelled, so that they had to take trains instead.

Ruby Tingle and Left Winter, the main stars of the setlist, had both occupied PAPER Gallery with the two audio-visual art exhibitions staged just prior to Axel Obiger’s current show, ‘Familiars’ and ‘Silk Graves’, respectively. To mark their new releases and bridge the gap between their contemporary art practices and music, both artists created new live works which they performed at A Modest Evening as a companion to their exhibitions at PAPER (running from 4 June – 13 August 2022). Inspired by the Eat Manchester Artists brief for this year’s British Art Show, both new works deal with forms of consumption both spiritually and physically. Their development into brief interactive performances brought the artists ideas and music to life, making their unique practices more tangible.

Ruby Tingle is an audio-visual artist and musician working with expanded collage and progressive electronica. Her work in ‘Familiars’ explored her connection to spirit animals and the colour red, inspired by recent time spent at her local wetlands. Ruby transformed PAPER using collage, sound and scent to tell stories of and develop her new performance character, Daughter of the Lagoons, a woman in a red dress who cares for imagined or extinct creatures. Incense and perfume floated around the exhibits, tactile plastic water lilies, reptiles and amphibians, waterweed, draped through the mixed media collages that formed the ‘Familiars’.

Left Winter is a cross-disciplinary artist and composer based in Manchester and Berlin. In ‘Silk Graves’, Left Winter presented a new photography and sound installation based on the contents of cobwebs, mainly remnants of insects eaten by spiders, exploring preservation and stories set in undisturbed and neglected human spaces. A new composition was released with the show’s launch, forming an immersive audio element at the gallery. Left Winter’s delicate, refined monochrome photographs for ‘Silk Graves’ found an eerily suitable home in the dry whitewashed concrete of Paper2.

At SOUP Manchester for A Modest Evening, after an atmospheric set from the singer Bitez, a British Jamaican born Nigerian R&B neo-soul singer/songwriter who embraces spiritual healing and social activism in her artistic and musical expression, Ruby sang a series of ballads sewn through with a snaking ribbon of mangrove swamp wilderness. Songs of moody soulful blues, urban beats and atmospheric electronics with a later introduction of racketeering bursts of guitar from KINRAR. Narratives spinning the kind of themes that stalk the expansive swamp lands of Mississippi and New Orleans, love, hope and betrayal or death, murder and loss. The audio installation for Ruby’s ‘Familiars’ exhibition was made by KINRAR, who also co-wrote on songs for and performed with her at Manchester Jazz Festival, coming on stage to perform those songs specifically.

Left Winter used minimalist moving images to create a sparse visual backdrop that functioned alongside his found sound and electronic based compositions. ‘I’m working on a series of very simple graphic pieces at the moment around the reflection of sounds,’ Left Winter said in the three-way interview in July. ‘The medium is currently print, but additionally represented is music, as are some other elements of immersive visual and audible representations.’ Sequential electronic ambient music and a projected backdrop of moving image combined, reflected and merged at SOUP, sending the audience on a constant journey to an imaginary destination.

In addition to her artistic practice and performance work, Ruby Tingle co-founded and manages No Such Thing Records with Dirty Freud. As an alternative, independent label, they are ‘driven by collaboration and a passion for fusing visual arts with music, giving Northern artists more opportunity, freedom and chance to grow a community.’ They aim to empower the artists they represent and ‘give them back creative control’.

PAPER Director David Hancock, partway through the evening, officially welcomed Axel Obiger to Manchester with a few warmly felt words. All the while, The Frog, Ruby’s long-time performance collaborator, wove through the performance space, out onto the street and back inside again. All the while the dim lighting, easy to lose footing in basement level darkness, impossible to see the floor. Figures against the wall, silhouettes in front of flickering projections. Electrical flow of colour and light, bounce of bass and scattering beats and bleeps rupturing the shadows intermittent as sheet lightening. Pillars holding up a night café where groups of people sit and talk or bask in Hopper-like isolation. Outside, the dark falls down.

(Read the four-way interview with Axel Obiger here)

(Read the three-way interview with Ruby Tingle and Left Winter here)