Conditions of Life: Jeremy Deller presents All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Northwest audiences will remember Jeremy Deller’s Procession at the 2009 Manchester International Festival, where he worked with different communities and groups in the city to create a very special Mancunian celebration. More recently, he represented Britain at the Venice Bienniale with English Magic, a visual narrative of past, present and future Britain, containing both fact and fiction. Deller is an artist with an interest in all things British, from the sounds of acid house to the eccentricities of gurning competitions.

This October, he returns to Manchester with his Hayward Touring show, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, at Manchester Art Gallery, before it visits Nottingham, Coventry and Newcastle. Looking at the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent urbanisation of Britain, it promises to be, in true Deller style, a collision of objects, narratives, and sounds.

Music has always played an important part in Deller’s work, and, he writes by email, for him “it's just an emotive way to get to people," adding: "we all like it more or less.” For All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, audiences are promised a presentation of industrial folk music, glam rock and heavy metal playing out alongside the sounds of the factory floor. This seemingly random assortment is just part of what Deller describes as a personal selection of things and events that interest him: through music, film, photography and 19th-century objects, he hopes to create a strong sense of the trauma that the Industrial Revolution – and its influence – has had on our lives today. Often simultaneously playing the role of artist, curator and, in many respects, historian, Deller sees the process of making the exhibition as “getting in a car having left the map at home” – and his Art History training at university as giving him “a historical perspective on art, maybe.”

Taken from a passage in The Communist Manifesto about how capitalism can change and adapt, the phrase 'all that is solid melts into air' is, Deller says, “unusual when you think of the context” – he sees it as “a metaphor or something for how we have gone from an industrial to a service/entertainment economy.” Whether recreating an important moment in British history for The Battle of Orgreave or conducting an investigation into British cultural pursuits for his Folk Archive, Deller’s work is political. His visual language relates to class, power and social experience, and it does so, he states bluntly, “because it's important.” Through his work Deller presents us with a mirror that allows us to look into the past, the present and even the future. But when asked what people can learn from All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, he says, “I’m not into teaching as such, more pointing at things, overturning stones to see what is underneath.”

Two figures are at the centre of the exhibition: James Sharples, a 19th-century blacksmith and self-taught painter famous for his engraving The Forge, which will feature in the exhibition; and Adrian Street, the professional wrestler who was born into a Welsh mining family. Prominent in the 70s and 80s, Street is famous for his glam-rock style and toying with audiences' perceptions of his sexuality. Although he may be unknown to some, Street is, Deller states, someone that “is very attractive to any one, let alone an artist,” and he hopes that the film he's made about him will convey Street’s character, making people aware of him. “Adrian especially is a character that transcended his environment through sheer will power and self-belief, he is 73 and still wrestles, he is a phenomenon, a one off,” Deller says. Both Sharples and Street are self-made men, and, for this exhibition, are representative of the industrial radicalisation of Britain, acting as symbols for people’s own ability to challenge the status quo on a very personal level.

For his approach to All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Deller is described in the exhibition notes as 'a social cartographer' – and it is through his visual mapping of seemingly unrelated events and objects that he is able to subvert and challenge historical and social frameworks, highlighting the importance of both personal and political histories.