Manual/2 emerged from a request by the London art venue "Kunstraum" to make a self-portrait-solo-exhibition.

In the film, actor Simon Paisley Day reads descriptions, written by different therapists from the artists’ file at the Psychoanalytical Institute. These texts are separated by introductions written by author Emily LaBarge. The backdrop s a screen onto which excerpts from Visser's oeuvre are projected, in particular works in which visser physically appears herself.

Visser rarely considers the shape of her work to be conclusive: two, five or ten years later after the first iteration they appear different in size, medium, order. Treating her own works as raw material, Visser’s project for Kunstraum uses her past practice as material to be reworked and sampled.
In reapproaching older works from a new angle, here Visser aims to recreate the psychologists' accounts with an emphasis on their power as stories and not on their accuracy in describing the psyche of human being. The shock of reading about oneself as 'client' (formerly patient) with all her natural behavior framed as such, is channeled through the detached position taken as a maker – probably her ultimate coping mechanism.

First shown at Kunstraum, London, who wrote:

Through a diversity of approaches over the past 25 years, Visser has consistently interrogated what it is to have artistic agency, reconfiguring the structures which surround us in contemporary art. Central to this new work for Kunstraum is the question of how the artist deals with their own history. For Manual/2: The Patient Artist Visser revisited four of her iconic works from the nineties that address the identity of the artist: Portrait of the Artist (1992), Ars Futura (1994), Gimines (1995) and The Lecture Series (1997/ 2004/ 2007).

Made possible with the support of the Mondriaan Foundation, Elephant Trust, The Embassy of the Kingdom of The Netherlands in the UK and the Akademie van Kunsten/KNAW, Nederland