Nemesis

With Nemesis Jason Minsky bid a final farewell to the greenroom. With his year long residency at the greenroom coming to a close, Nemesis was Jason Minsky’s final performance at the greenroom. This was the artist’s first durational performance and it stretched him both physically and mentally.

The title of the piece suggests a paradox. Nemesis this word refers to the future and possible fate of the artist. Caught between the familiarity of his previous surroundings and the uncertainty of what lies ahead, in this performance Minsky asks us to think about future possibilities and issues of success and failure and what this means for individuals. Combining this in the title with the word Nemesis which was the name of Manchester’s first rowing club, Minsky plays with the meaning of this word and links it to the metaphorical and physical act of making a journey.

A journey is something that implies a movement from one place to the next, involving an arrival and a departure and always marred by the prospect of leaving. Is a journey simply a case of hailing a taxi or getting a lift from a friend or does it involve something more? Faced everyday with the act of leaving how do we choose to make these journeys and how do we undertake them?

For Minsky, there always seems to be a battle going on between the physical act of making a journey and a person’s own journey of self-discovery, an inner conversation that everyone can remember having with themselves.

As a means of posing these questions the durational performance will involve the physical act of rowing, referencing the Nemesis Rowing Club founded in 1847 and which occupied the waterways of Manchester and Salford. The River Irwell has always served as the main connecting waterway between these two cities, acting as a point of connection and separation and providing a further pathway to the sea. But, what do we do when we reach the sea? Is that the end of our journey?

Reconfiguring this through the act of rowing, Minsky asks us to think about the journeys we take, why we take them and what we hope to get out of them?Have we finally reached our Nemesis?