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A groundbreaking Manchester exhibition is hoping to give people a new perspective on both art and recovery, says Rhea Mehmet.

Recoverist Curators: Reimagining the World We Live In is an exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, where six people in recovery from substance use took the lead. Given free rein to select works from the gallery’s collection, their choices proved unexpectedly radical – not for including provocative artists like Francis Bacon and Tracey Emin, but for being filtered through the lens of lived experience.

The show caps a year of workshopping and research. And for Dominic Pillai, curator of social engagement at Portraits of Recovery (PORe), it’s deeply personal. I sat down with him to discuss the exhibition.

You came into this role with a background in filmmaking and community arts. What specifically drew you to Portraits of Recovery?

I started as a workshop facilitator on projects like the BFI Film Academy, and through working with charities as a project manager. I moved into community arts, creatively facilitating various marginalised groups – particularly people with disabilities, neurodivergence and mental health issues. Curation has always been a prominent aspect of my own creative practice, so moving into this area professionally felt like a natural progression. But there’s something else. As a neurodivergent person with South Asian heritage, a long-term mental health condition and lived experience of recovery, I am acutely aware that many areas of the community are often excluded from the recovery narrative. Portraits of Recovery aims to readdress that through its intersectional work, and it was this approach that drew me.

You’ve spoken about the decision to be open about your own recovery journey – was that a difficult choice?

In 12-step programmes, anonymity is fundamentally important because of the stigma of addiction. Although Portraits of Recovery’s ethos is around visibility we also want to respect people’s choices, which can at times be a tightrope act. When I started in this role, I had to come to terms with the fact that my being in recovery would be out in the open. There was no external pressure to ‘out’ myself, but I felt it was important that the people we work with know I’m part of their community. A critical part of facilitating a group is building trust, and being open about my lived experience supports this. 

The Recoverist Curators project placed six people in recovery with no prior curatorial experience centre stage, in selecting and re-interpreting artworks. What did the process feel and look like in practice?

The project was led by Portraits of Recovery in partnership with the Whitworth, tasking six curators – Anastasia, Annie, Chanje, Paul, Penny and myself – with reinterpreting the gallery’s collection through the lens of recovery. Meeting bi-weekly for a year, they began by reflecting on themes like ‘self-care’, ‘pride’, and ‘journeying’, using these to guide archive dives and discussions until a resonant set of works emerged.

The gallery sector is start­ing to acknowledge the lack of representation within their institutions. Through a socially engaged, collaborative approach to curation it provides an oppor­tunity to address this issue but also provide space for these miss­ing voices to be heard. I’m interested in the idea of disrupting traditional art spaces because they can often feel inaccessible and non-inclusive, which is very much in line with Portraits of Recovery’s activist approach. 

The exhibition pairs major artworks alongside deeply personal interpretation panels. You, for instance, see your former self in a Tillmans photograph of friends outside a Berlin club. Anastasia finds the joy of her recovery in a Hockney still life. How do you navigate sharing these personal testimonies and exploring such vulnerability?

It’s about doing things ‘with’ people in recovery, not ‘about’ them. Being trained in visual anthropology taught me the importance of communities using creative practice to tell their own stories. The project sparked fascinating discussions around how substance use is often problematically represented in culture – and how we could rewrite that stigmatised narrative. What excited me most was that the curators didn’t just select work; they wrote interpretations examining each piece through the lens of their own lived experience.

Recovery is vast and can be explored in many ways. Those interpretation panels aren’t just labels – they’re an interventionist reframing. You may have seen that Bacon before, but you haven’t seen it through these eyes.

The Whitworth has committed to preserving the curators’ interpretations in their database and hosting AA meetings in the gallery. That feels like more than just an exhibition – it’s an institutional change. 

Exactly. A lasting legacy of this exhibition is giving the recovery community a permanent voice at the Whitworth. Each curator’s interpretations will live in the collection’s database, so anyone searching for these artworks will encounter what it means to be a ‘recoverist’. Long-term, we want the Whitworth to host regular fellowship meetings, which usually happen in hidden, uninspiring spaces. Holding one in a temple of art is nationally groundbreaking, but it aligns with our belief that art is critically essential to recovery. The project challenged the Whitworth to rethink how it listens and shares power. Rather than leading from the top, they embraced our expertise and we shaped the exhibition together.

You use the words ‘recoverist’ and ‘recoverism’ – can you explain what they mean?

Recoverism is a form of cultural activism that uses art to challenge how we think and live. Rooted in Manchester’s history of social movements, it’s about making recovery from substance use visible and valued. We call those we work with ‘recoverists’ (recovery + activist), not ‘participants’ or ‘service users’. The term reflects self-empowerment and the drive to be the change. For a hyper-marginalised community facing deep stigma, visibility is everything. Portraits of Recovery creates platforms for these voices, breaking down barriers to cultural inclusion.

You’ve spoken elsewhere about art being an alternative addiction. What do you mean by that?

There are a lot of artists in recovery, and for them creativity is an essential part of their recovery journey. Art provides meaning and purpose to their lives. Putting down a substance is only the first step. It’s where you choose to channel addictive behaviour that is key. Creativity is a more positive, less destructive activity to be addicted to.

The exhibition runs until July – what do you hope audiences take away from it?

I hope audiences come expecting one thing but leave with an entirely new perspective. Perhaps they’ll be attracted by a famous name – Hockney, Tillmans, Bacon, but stay for Anastasia, Penny, Chanje, Annie, Paul and Dom. By coming to understand that addiction is a response to the consequential pain of being alive, they might better see what it means to be a person in recovery. As Anastasia puts it, ‘To me, recovery is at the bottom of the washing up bowl. It’s a beautiful place to start.’

Photography by Joe Fildes from the Whitworth collection through a Recoverist Lens. Featuring curators Chanje, Anastasia, Paul, Annie and Penny.

Find out more at portraitsofrecovery.org.uk