Manifesta 5 and beyond: notes from a tour in the Basque Country
By Ombretta Agr�
Every year in late Spring, IKT, the Association of Contemporary Art Curators, holds a congress in a European City — when possible in connection with an important art event, be it the Venice Biennale, Documenta, or Manifesta. I became a member three years ago and since then I have participated in three congresses, the most recent one being held from June 10th to the 13th in Northern Spain in conjunction with the opening of Manifesta 5.
The fifth edition of the European Biennial of Contemporary Art brought together 50 artists from all over Europe in a variety of venues and sites in and around Donostia-San Sebastian, a beautiful city in the heart of the Basque region of Northern Spain. As the press release reads, "the host city was selected by IFM (the International Foundation Manifesta) on account of its dynamic historical and socio-political background, as well as its trans-regional importance".
When I first received the list of the artists, I was glad to see that most of the names were unknown to me. It is, in fact, the tradition of Manifesta to concentrate mainly on the work of emerging artists. This particular aspect, in today’s art world where we witness the proliferation of Biennials that often showcase the works of the same group of "blockbuster" names, gives it a refreshing angle. Also, the fact that the two curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Marta Kuzma, decided to combine emerging artists with important yet overlooked ones from the 1970s and 80’s added an interesting twist to the exhibition.
At least on paper.
Unfortunately, having visited it, I found Manifesta 5 quite disappointing.
I may be old-fashioned, but I still believe that the power of an artwork lays in its ability to stimulate some kind of emotion. It may be an intellectual engagement, or it may well come from "your gut", but something must be stimulated in the viewer when he/she looks at or "experiences" an artwork, or an exhibition in total. The Biennial, for the most part, lacked of any kind of pathos, and left an impression of coldness and formality.
The artworks in the various venues were impeccably installed, but the absence of any wall text, a legitimate curatorial choice, made many of them quite cryptic and hard to "read" either as part of an overall context, or as individual works. The press material that was given to us, including a press release and excerpts from essays written by both curators for the catalogue (which had yet to be released) was of little help.
The highlighted concepts were vague and convoluted, starting from the title, With All Due Intent, Lawrence Wiener’s contribution to the show. The curators, and here again I quote the press release, "…offer visitors a variety of paths through the exhibition, with the aid of an expandable list of key concepts and titles, beginning with …POLITICAL RUMOUR / CULTURAL LANDSCAPES / PRESENT IMPERFECT / RUINS IN REVERSE / … / ENCOUNTER WITH AMBIGUITY…and so on". I, as well as many other colleagues with whom I shared my perplexity, had a very hard time connecting the nineteen concepts with the actual works, and in trying to pinpoint those "paths" throughout the various venues.
The words enigmatic and cryptic, being repeated on several occasions, seemed to underline the curators’ lack of clarity, as did the rhetoric in the essays, which was sometimes overwhelming.
While I did not agree with the way the Biennial was structured, I did find some interesting works. Here are some of the most captivating.
Our itinerary started from the Ethnographic Museum San Telmo, a former monastery, which presented works by 12 artists examining "issues of national psyche and subjective identity through a mixture and cross-contamination of folkloric, pagan and mystical elements". One of the two most notable contributions there was a room full of curious objects and sculptures by Mark Manders and, the second, a entrancing film by Russian Yevgenty Yufit. In the case of the Dutch artist Manders, who has built a private iconography of forms, sculptures and images that are constantly repeated and re-combined, a few essential keys to allow the audience to enter the artist’s intimate universe would have been a great aid to appreciate the work. The film by Yufit, entitled Killed by Lightning, installed in an impressive darkened space which used to be the church of the monastery, had a narrative structure much easier to grasp. It told the story that unfolds within the subconscious mind of a professor of anthropology, alternating between present time and flash backs that bring her back to the death of her father, a submarine captain in World War II.
On my way to another of the main venues, Koldo Mitxelena, I visited the Soto Aquarium, where Irish artist Garret Phelan created an amusing site-specific installation in a former boat storage facility in the historic port. The work, Lung Love, consisted of a sequence of quickly rendered graffiti-style drawings made with a black marker on the walls of the two-floor abandoned facility. The sketches and diagrams related to various subject matters such as health, electromagnetic and manufactured energy.
Koldo Mitxelena, an imposing building which houses San Sebastian’s main library and whose subterranean level has been turned into an exhibition space, hosted works of nine artists that related to a rupture in the chronological sense of time. Quite touching, yet sadly a bit boring, were two videos presented by Belgian Sven Augustijnen. Johan and Francois are documentaries that portray patients suffering from aphasia, a disease that affects the language centers of the brain with symptoms that include chronic memory loss and inability to generate responses. On the other hand lavishly beautiful and enchanting was another video, Deer, by Russians Victor Alimpiev and Sergey Vishnevsky. Set in a Russian forest, Deer records two distant lovers caught in some kind of nostalgic reverie. Shot in strong iridescent colors, the video is accompanied by Erik Satie music.
The last of the three main venues in San Sebastian was Kubo Kutxa Kursaal, a peculiar orthogonal structure designed by architect Rafael Moneo, which has been dedicated to showcase contemporary art. Conceptually this was the exhibition that worked the best as its artists were inspired by architecture’s implicit relationship to time and space. Here, the most interesting works were by Portuguese Carlos Bunga and German Silke Schatz. Bunga built a large home made of cardboard walls, which, after the press-opening day, was to be tore down by the artist. The precarious structure provided a powerful contrast with the geometric precision of the modernist structure that temporarily hosted it. It connected the most purist conception of architecture with the impoverished cacophony of shantytowns. Silke Schatz’s large scale drawing Today Kalea Foru, Hondarribia, 1985, recalled the artist’s memory of Spanish civilian guards attacking the Basque seaside city of Hondarribia in 1985. Schatz finely rendered architectural drawings remind of Julie Mehretu’s work, as they produce mental diagrams that illustrate the spaces between actual sites and personal meanings attached to them.
In front of Kubo Kursaal, a shuttle bus was waiting to take us to the decaying port area of Pasaia, a few kilometers from the city center, a neighborhood which reflected the antithetical nature of its urban environment .
The main venue in this location was a former fish-processing warehouse, a mesmerizing raw space, described as an industrial readymade, called Casa Ciriza. The factory hosted twenty-one artists on its four floors. The works presented there bridged various media and explored different themes and approaches. Some dealt with nostalgic memories of years gone by, as in the black and white triptych of archival images projected on the ground floor by Ukrainians Iliya Chichkan and Kyrill Protsenko, and the exquisite video by the collective D.A.E., one of my favorite works of the entire Biennial. The point of departure for the project was a 1963 film, Op�racion H, directed by N�stor Basterretxea in collaboration with sculptor Jorge Oteiza. A wealthy businessman of this area, Juan Huarte, who wanted them to document the activity of his factories commissioned the film. The end result is a poetic view of the cold, industrial environment achieved through brilliant use of photography, editing and sound.
On the first floor of Casa Ciriza two artists provided a quite formalist approach to sculpture. On one hand there was E, a kinetic, interactive sculpture developed in collaboration with a team of technicians and scientists, by Italian Paola Pivi. The object’s steel needles rise and fall according to the viewer’s physical proximity, as if the sculpture has the ability to react to natural stimuli. Not far from Pivi’s work, British Conrad Shawcross, presented a moving sculpture, Circadium (Loop System), made of continuous spiral of wood that perpetually spins on itself.
The entire second floor was dedicated to Czech artist Zbynek Baladran whose video installation simultaneously presented on various screens animations, documentaries, and propaganda films from his country’s past.
On the top floor, the highlight was three videos from the early 70’s shot by Ducth artist Bas Jan Ader, who went mysteriously missing in 1975. Fall and Broken Fall investigate his interest with subjectivity by connecting the acting out of the fall and the real life moment of relinquishing control.
Not far from Casa Ceriza were located the last two works which concluded the tour. Both of them were intimately connected to the specificity and the roughness of the local neighborhood, but in different ways. Turkish Huseyin Alptekin often refers in his body of work to the experience of the non-native pedestrian within foreign landscapes in order to emphasize the absurdity evident in the signage of global economics. For Manifesta 5 he reproduced signs for hotels using names borrowed from areas that have been, or still are, devastated by violence such as Hotel Odessa, Hostal Balkan, Hotel Baghdad. The signs, which were lit at night, were placed in a dark alley located behind the train station, whose walls were covered with graffiti. This place had notably been the scene of acts of violence against the people of the area. Last, but not least, was the imposing, and maybe too invasive, installation by Belgian Jan De Cock. The artist took over Ondartxo, an entire, former shipbuilding warehouse. The installation, Denkmal 2, an architecture within the architecture, made of heavy pressed board evolved over a 2-month period in relation to the features of the existing space. The venue had an enchanting and decadent quality to it that was unfortunately overwhelmed by the artist’s intervention.
More than the show itself, one of the most interesting aspects about the use of this particular area has been the founding of the Office of Alternative Urban Planning (TOOAUP) in conjunction with the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. The focus of this initiative is to stimulate a process of urban regeneration of the impoverished area of Pasaia port. Through this partnership the curators enabled Manifesta 5 to extend its role within the local community by effectively undertaking a feasibility study into how artists and cultural agents might be called on to propose solutions to the problem of integrating the dilapidated space of the port, with the inhabited areas of Pasaia.
This, to the writer, was the most valuable, and hopefully lasting, contribution of the curators not only to the Biennial but also to its host city.
