The 2024 biennial will be hosted in Barcelona; and in Pristina for the 2022 edition
Roving biennial Manifesta has announced that its 2026 edition will be hosted in Germany’s Ruhr area – the sixteenth edition will examine ‘the effects of a changing global world order against the backdrop of a region that has not only been shaped by coal mining and heavy industries but also international trade relations, such as the New Silk Road’.
The proposal is the joint initiative of local institutions and curators from the region. ‘Manifesta 16 poses questions about the consequences and opportunities of a globally changing world in a regional context from an artistic and scientific point of view, but above all in the daily reality of the people of this region,’ they wrote in their bid. ‘The focus lies on the crossroads and connections that manifest themselves in the region, as well as the neighbouring cultural areas. What visible and (still) invisible influences do these have on the future of the region against the backdrop of global developments? Where is the global reflected in the regional, where the regional in the global?’
The news follows swiftly on from last week’s announcement that the nomadic exhibition – which takes places in a different city for each edition – will move to Catalonia in 2024, hosted in Barcelona alongside other metropolitan Catalan cities (L’Hospitalet, Terrassa, Badalona, Sabadell, Mataró, Sant Cugat, Cornellà, El Prat de Llobregat, Granollers y Santa Coloma de Gramenet). Pristina, Kosovo will be the site of the 2022 edition.
Writing in ArtReview last month, Digby Warde-Aldam examined Manifesta’s outing in Marseille this year (its thirteenth edition). ‘Despite Manifesta 13’s focus on the ruinous effects of thoughtless ‘urban regeneration’ schemes, events like this one play their role in enabling the kind of gentrification they condemn,’ he wrote. ‘You’re left wondering quite how far an explicitly socially conscious initiative like Manifesta can withstand the weight of its own contradictions when faced with unignorable tragedy.’
