Jeremy Deller with Alan Kane @ Jupiter Artland, until 15 Sep

Deller and Kane mine the eccentricities of British popular culture and vernacular art to imbue everyday rituals such as tea breaks or Googling with exotic allure.

Opening the show with a re-boot of their performance from Deller’s Procession at Manchester’s International Festival in 2009, Steel Harmony soothe festival-frayed nerves with joyful Caribbean steel drum renditions of British underground anthems. The gritty anxiousness of a Joy Division track is gleefully subverted by the playful segues between histories and subcultures which Deller is so accomplished at drawing on.

Procession is re-presented here by appliquéd banners made in one of Deller’s many collaborations with skilled customisers and makers. A video-document accompanies to contextualise, chronicling the glory days of the ‘Unrepentant Smokers’ or ‘Carnival Queens’ who once held them aloft in a celebration of Manchester’s ‘public space and the people occupying it.’  Revisiting the glorious parade in a sparse gallery setting, the banners are rarefied and function more like souvenirs struggling to convey the pride with which the everyman (goths, football mascots, Peterloo memorial campaigners) claimed their place in the cultural limelight.

In their affectionately-collated Folk Archive (c.1999-2005) Deller and Alan Kane eschewed such a discrepancy with ‘High Art,’ and the collaged influence of this earlier project lives on in the two collaborations shown at Jupiter. The pair’s infamous ‘souped-up’ Tea Urn and Teapot draws on this ‘village fête aesthetic’ while the crowd-pleasing Steam Powered Internet Machine takes a wonderfully anachronistic approach to powering a ‘portable’ computer. (The connection between ‘the industrial and digital revolutions’ is perhaps less relatable in this setting than when juxtaposed with a disused power station.)

With creative collaboration, Deller injects vitality into the mundane, but much like the chipped mugs which accompany the daily tea ritual, this presentation, made up of charming, well-loved elements, still feels delightfully mismatched. [Kate Andrews]