MIF15: Arca and Jesse Kanda @ Hallé St Peters, Manchester, 4 July

Consulting the Notes app after Arca and Jesse Kanda's appearance together in Manchester is an unhelpful exercise, revealing only a stuttered list of abstractions: “insectoid,” “demon babies,” “pain.” Okay...

Earlier in the day as part of Manchester International Festival's discussion programme, Interdependence, the two artists – in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist – talked about their disregard for the inextreme; only the furthest points of expression and emotion are of interest to Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, and his close friend and visual collaborator Kanda. This is evident tonight in a performance that lurches from pretty, febrile synth work to Ghersi dancing sadly with his digital alter-ego, to him rampaging down a specially built catwalk in thigh-high leathers, straps and girdle, gnashing indignantly through a slop of industrial gabba. 

Kanda's presence, meanwhile, is muted, but it is clear that Ghersi draws energy from him being there. The pair first encountered each other as teenagers through online artists' community DeviantArt (there is something nice about this boxy Myspace-era platform having spawned their properly post-everything work), and their bond is palpable in person as well as in their shared ideas of sensory play.

Kanda's video work is recognisable by a fixation on the body and its boundaries – likely in direct response to Arca's own dysmorphic electronics, and not unlike an accelerated, internet-raised Chris Cunningham. Via keyhole imaging we peer over the frothy, bloody walls of indistinct internal chambers – of the heart? The throat? – while minutes later, oiled figures pulse in an oddly controlled orgiastic mass. As these stripped bodies grind and gyrate, the contrast between their exaggerated flesh and smooth, smelted heads renders them both confrontationally sexual and strangely alien. It's a queering of the figure that Ghersi nods to in his own getup, his slight frame contorted by platform boots and quartered off or exposed by disproportioned garments, which he rearranges throughout the night.

Part A/V display, part runway disruption and part performance art, this is a consistently interesting if disjointed show, best when – fittingly – deep within its own extremes of wounded metallics (the menacing cicada click of Xen) or sweet, spectral melancholy (Sad Bitch; Thievery). It's also at these moments that the clean shell of Hallé St Peters feels unsuitable, and you wish you were underground; in the dark, exiled. However, after the following night sees their set's beautiful brutalism lost in the echoey bowl of Castlefield Arena (in support of Björk), this Ancoats church in retrospect feels like a clever choice, the rose window blinking with aggressive strobe and the sparseness of the room lending a vulnerability to the audience. As Ghersi writhes offstage and stalks through the crowd, there is everywhere and nowhere to go.