Manifesta: Telling Stories for Exposure
True to its tradition of travelling biennials, Manifesta will be arriving this summer in Pristina. After editions in Ljubljana, Frankfurt, Genk and St. Petersburg—and with upcoming editions in Barcelona (2024) and the Ruhr region (2026)—the event will be occupying and stirring up the entire Kosovar capital. In contrast to many biennials that land in cities like spaceships, filled with works of art disconnected from local realities, Manifesta chooses a sustainable and contextual approach. It all began with an urban study, commissioned this time from the architectural agency CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, which not only provided a survey of the places, spaces or buildings that could accommodate the event, but also analysed the city’s historical, social, structural and urban planning issues. This approach—marked by urbanology—aims to define a long-term strategy, proposing solutions that will allow local cultural institutions to continue the work initiated by the event once Manifesta ends—in this case on October 30th, 2022.
The curator of this edition, Berlin-based Australian Catherine Nichols, began by studying CRA’s research and based her artistic project on its results. This informed a choice of iconic places. The former Eastern Bloc is full of “modern socialist” buildings which are unfortunately struggling to find their place in World Heritage lists and often find themselves reduced to contemporary ruins. The Grand Hotel Pristina and, to an even greater extent, the National Library of Kosovo are major examples of this type of architecture, and it seemed natural for the biennial to appropriate them and demonstrate their potential for the future. But Manifesta will also be held in a brick factory, a very Soviet “Palace of Youth and Sports,” a cinema, the ethnography museum and various public spaces.
STORYTELLING
Over the past ten years, Nichols has collaborated on a number of exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, and the Augusteum in Wittenberg. She has produced exhibitions about the theologian Martin Luther; about the sun in science and its representations; and about sexuality in the age of internet pornography. His last project was the artistic coordination of the events related to the centenary of Joseph Beuys in 2021 and, instead of focusing on the artist’s yellow grease and brown felt aesthetics, she called on his social and societal experiments to organise a wide forum for ideas capable of addressing the modern world. A great fan of radio, she took the op