More on recovery at
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
Left: D. Hoyle, UNSEEN Performance artist David Hoyle, who presided
over walkabout performance Apples & Other Fruit at Manchester’s
HOME. Created as part of UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities
Above: David Hoyle, Manchester Pride Performance artist David Hoyle
runs a stall called 5 Minutes of Peace, where you can’t buy anything.
Manchester Pride, August 2017. Part of UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities
Below: 10b (2) Out of place and at the margins: one hundred songs
for Kneeze and Vijay by Sutapa Biswas, Rochdale bus station
interchange. Created as part of UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities
Recovery for me is about freedom. But where is the freedom when services are
not representative and fail to meet the needs of not just queer but other culturally
diverse people? Tailored, more inclusive approaches to recovery are critical and a
civil and human right. These are all very timely considerations as we’re in the midst
of celebrating 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. Yet it
would appear that for some of us in, or working towards, recovery we’re still the
victims of systematic homophobia or other discriminatory forms. I’ve personally
experienced and witnessed this from in and outside of the rehab and ‘rooms’.
Nearly a decade since rehab I’m finally seeking integration of these two polarised
and opposing identities towards a more liveable identity fit. I founded Portraits of
Recovery (PORe), a visual arts charity, in 2011 in response to my professional
background in the arts and my own addiction recovery experiences. PORe’s work
looks at bringing about new ways of knowing addiction and recovery by working
with contemporary art and artists. The publically exhibited work, commissioned
from a range of artists, supports the emancipatory reframing of addiction and
recovery identities. In other words, it aims to blow away the myths and legends in
favour of social change by presenting more authentic and diverse forms of self-
representation.
Art has become my central strategy for recovery. I conceive, make, experience,
produce and collect it. Art helps me feel good about myself, gives me a reason to
get out of bed in the morning and a purpose for living. If it works for me then why
not for others, as previous PORe projects have demonstrated? Working with an
individual’s existing cultural capital as a transferable asset from the old life to the
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
new, can through additional cultural investment make sense of the past. This
approach also helps to support a sense of cultural citizenship as a device for social
justice, inclusion and change.
PORe’s latest offering, UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities, is an umbrella arts
project, under which sits a series of new commissions that explore the viability and
desire for Greater Manchester’s South Asian, LGBT+ and disability recovery
communities to be visible and understood. At its heart is a project that draws
attention to and visually c elebrates the diversity of our recovery communities. It also
speaks to the urgent need for culturally diverse and tailored approaches to recovery,
which are few and far between. The project has been developed in collaboration with
Professor Amanda Ravetz from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).
UNSEEN is a reactive stance against the white heteronormative bias of
treatment and recovery services, seeking to change this imbalance through activist-
related artistic and cultural advocacy. Its public-facing exhibition, performance and
events programmes engage the public in dialogue for the emancipatory reframing
of addiction and recovery identities.
Stereotyping does nobody any good – not people looking towards recovery, their
family and friends, nor health services or wider society. Holding or promoting such
one-dimensional views is discriminatory and inaccurate. UNSEEN frames addiction
in diverse communities as a health concern – not a choice.
PORe’s work is couched within Recoverism, developed in response to a cost-
cutting and politically hijacked recovery agenda. This new social movement, borne
out of Manchester and the North West, supports a more inclusive, interdisciplinary
Recoverist discourse as allied to the arts. Led by Clive Parkinson, of Arts for Health at
MMU in partnership with PORe, it was an outcome of a European arts project called
I AM. We’re all recovering from something, so why not invite others to join in the
conversation? More about this can be learned from the online Recoverist Manifesto.
I’ll finish with a quote taken from the publication’s introduction by author Will
Self, as this sums up what recovery and Recoverism is about for me:
‘One thing that the vicissitudes of addictive illness teaches us, it’s that in the last
analysis what matters is not our circumstances or our experiences – let alone our
thoughts – but our feelings: we need to feel and be felt by other feeling people.’
Mark Prest is the founding director of Portraits of Recovery, a curator, a man in
recovery and a recovery activist. Full details of UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities at
www.portraitsofrecovery.org.uk
UNSEEN EVENTS
Artist’s talk: Sutapa Biswas discusses the work she created as
part of UNSEEN. With Dr Anandi Ramamurthy, reader in Post-
Colonial Cultures, Sheffield Hallam University and Sunny
Dhadley, founding director of the Recovery Foundation.
Saturday 7 October 2017, 1-3pm Touchstones Rochdale. Free, but
booking required on 01706 924 928
Installations: Out of place and at the margins: one hundred
songs for Kneeze and Vijay, Sutapa Biswas’s installations
created as part of UNSEEN: Simultaneous Realities.
Until 16 December 2017, Rochdale bus station interchange and
Touchstones Rochdale. Free
Film: Launch of Fruit Bowl, directed by Professor Amanda Ravetz
and Huw Wahl. A portrait of performance artist David Hoyle.
Thursday 16 December 6-9pm, Whitworth Art Gallery. Free
October 2017 | drinkanddrugsnews | 7