The heart is deceitful above all things @ HOME, Manchester

Review by Sacha Waldron | 30 Jun 2015

I moved from London to Liverpool aged ten and started a new primary school. In the playground, on the first day, a group of girls waved a copy of Smash Hits at me and asked the key question designed to measure and assess how worthy I was of their friendship: “Which member of Take That would you snog?”

I froze, reluctant to admit I was still on ABBA cassettes. Not being a Take That fan was an early 90s girl crime. I named the only band member I could remember: “Mark Owen?” Their murmurs of approval confirmed this was an acceptable answer. I was in. That Christmas, Take That & Party was added to Santa’s list. I learned all the lyrics just to be on the safe side.

Irina Gheorghe had a much more committed adoration of the baby-faced and hairless Ken doll pop star. “The reason I like Mark Owen so much,” she writes in one diary, “is that he is the smallest and sweetest of all TT boys.” This, accompanied by a well-loved Owen poster, is part of a photographic and textual installation work John, you Like Her, Don't You? 1994-1996 (2004) exploring Gheorge’s often obsessive and secretive teen boy musings (a list, for example, of the 100 most attractive boys in school) as laid out in various notebooks reproduced and translated (from Romanian) on the gallery walls.

Snogging is also very much on the agenda for Zina Saro-Wiwa with her work Eaten by the Heart (2012). 12 African and mixed race couples kiss on screen for four to seven minutes each and we watch both the passion and the mundanity of the mulch and munch of mouths performing this intimate dance together as if they wish to consume one another. The large scale projection, opposite an 11 meter-long pink neon text from Ragnar Kjartansson spelling ‘Scandinavian Pain’ are both excellent ways to show off the new HOME gallery, which has gone from Cornerhouse pokey to palatial.

Skipping past Douglas Coupland with his neon posters and propositions often using internet or text speak (‘Flag as Appropriate’), a confusing mobile phone thingy from Jeremy Bailey (an app that turns your iPhone into a sickle?) and a forgettable temporary tattoo machine from Gemma Parker amongst others – we are also treated to some very good video work. The best of which comes from Wu-Tsang and Alexandro Segade with Mishima in Mexico. The (approximately) 14 minute narrative follows a writer and director as they hole up in a Mexican hotel room trying to finish a film adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s novel Thirst for Love. The two move between characters in the novel, dressing up and acting out certain scenes to flesh out ideas of obsession, jealousy and love to re-situate the novel within a queer context. Reality, performance and fiction blur in this interesting and stylish layered loop that leaves you wanting more. 

The heart is deceitful above all things runs at HOME until 26 July http://homemcr.org/exhibition/the-heart-is-deceitful-above-all-things