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BALTIC MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS

JUNE 2024 - MARCH 2025 MANUAL LABOUR

When Rank Hovis opened the Baltic Flour Mill in 1950, it held 300 workers managing over 22,000 tonnes of grain in a towering deco building on the Gateshead side of the River Tyne. Men worked with the most modern factory machinery of the day as they produced and distributed flour, while women were employed in the cafeteria and offices. With a vast open interior, it was a hive of activity with deafening mechanical noises ricocheting around an open interior, and lorries and boats continuously brought in grain and took away flour.

Now, over four decades since its closure and 22 years since it reopened as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, some of that industrial energy is back inside. Artist Hannah Perry has constructed a series of scaffolding rigs and industrial structures to take up the space of the Baltic’s largest double-height gallery. It isn’t just the physicality of Perry’s work that fills the space, however. A 14-channel soundtrack fills the air in an overlapping, glitching, and occasionally mechanical noise..

 This whole project was intended to become an exhibition continuing that exploration of masculinity, it was a body of work that grew from a 2019 artist-in-residence programme at the Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Russia.

There, Perry filmed the largest titanium factory in the world, just outside Siberia, and immense asbestos mines at Asbost, Sverdlovsk Oblast, with a drone. 

A lot has happened in the world since 2020. Putin invaded Ukraine and the Ural Industrial Biennial appears to have stopped, then Covid paused most of the world, and in the UK cuts to arts funding alongside increasing material, energy, and Brexit-related price-rises have resulted in huge issues for the cultural ecosystem. Amongst all of this—and because of some of it—the Baltic exhibition was twice postponed, and Perry’s personal world also changed a bit: the artist now has two children.

Gender is still central to the reconfigured exhibition, 

The movement of the two hip bones is smoother and fluid, but the mechanical operation is loud, visible, and industrial—not unlike the brute force of melting and shaping metal captured from Russia and cutting into the film. Where Perry’s original project focussed on the male body’s physical fitness and endurance in both work and leisure spaces, this sculpture speaks to female bodily exertion.

Like the pole dancer, the pelvic bones are playfully spinning, but there are other forces at play beyond the balletic. 

 There are still strands of the artist’s previous subjects and visual languages at play—the industrial is ever-present, reflective and metallic finishes remain, and cars still weave through the work. So, as well as presenting as a complete triptych installation in itself, Manual Labour also documents how the artistic process—and self-identity of the artist—changes over time in a compellingly biographic way. And, reflected back in those shining surfaces, it also offers the possibility for viewers—of any gender—to consider their own relationship to the issues of labour, class, work, and power that Perry explores. 

Hannah Perry’s show will be on at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art until 16 March 2025. 

Words by Will Jennings


Curated by Katherine Welsh

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