Manifesta 7By Alessandro Rabottini
Published: October 1, 2008
 
Photo by Thomas Mueller. Courtesy Herald St., London, and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
Klaus Weber, installation view of "Shape of the Ape" (2007–08) at Manifesta 7, Trento.
Photo by Laurence Lafforgue. Courtesy the artist
Jorge Otero-Pailos, installation view of "The Ethics of Dust" (2008) Manifesta 7, Bolzano
"Manifesta 7" at various venues Split among four towns, four shows, and three curatorial teams, the seventh edition of the European Biennial of Contemporary Art was a careful response to the challenge of portraying the Continent as a cultural entity, expanding its parameters to include 200 artists from all over the world. Set this time in Trentino–South Tyrol, an Italian region located at the crossroads of Latin and German culture, it was designed as a multicentered presentation of diversified artistic practices. Manifesta 7 turned out, though, to hinge on separation: each curatorial group worked independently, only uniting for a fourth collaborative project at the show’s northernmost point. Together, the quartet of shows made a dynamic stab at the “grand show” concept, but the outcomes were not equally pleasing. In Rovereto, where Adam Budak and his curatorial team located “Principle Hope” in postindustrial sites like the former hangar Ex-Peterlini and a tobacco factory, the over-debated issue of “the cultural and political ecology of space and its publicness” turned into a sort of Dictionary of Received Ideas about “access” and “democracy.” Good works were not lacking—see Danh Vo’s Untitled (2008), in which power and private pleasure were investigated via a collection of Henry Kissinger’s letters; João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s sculptural treatment of moving images in their complex installation of objects and 16 mm films; or Johannes Vogl’s Black Hole in a White Cube (2008), an almost invisible installation of several peep holes looking into rooms hidden behind the walls. Problematic, though, was the hypertheoretical framing of such sensitive works within a pseudosociological, almost superficial set of concepts with one overall effect: the emptying of the concepts’ core meanings. Budak’s extensive research is creditable, his selection of many new artists consistent with one of the main traditional features of Manifesta—but still quantity here undermined coherence. What might have appeared as a straightforward showcase for young artists more closely resembled an improvised installation. Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg’s The Soul (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls) was, by contrast, both thoughtfully designed and carefully installed. Conceived for Trento’s Old Post Office, it was an inspired inquiry into power’s interiorization, a journey through the shadows of education, inclusion, and normality. The curators’ history of the “soul” as a culturally determined product of guilt and restraint was successfully articulated in works thematizing the collapsing together of subliminal forces, daily life, and history: the aphasic characters in Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys’s new film Untitled (2008) perfectly counterpointed the choreography of wonder and doubt in Klaus Weber’s installation Shape of the Ape (2007)— the Hamlet-recalling image of an ape gazing at a human skull was repeated via multiple sculptures—while Pietro Roccasalva’s display of the same image through different media provided a painterly background to the many works on view using the cinematic as a mode to investigate the shaping of collective consciousness. Meanwhile, fictional museums—designed by academics, architects, filmmakers, and artists, devoted to pedagogy, psychiatry, and the soul’s grave that is photography—punctuated the exhibition route, brilliant curatorial devices illuminating the show’s many conceptual foci. Bolzano’s former aluminum factory Ex Alumix housed “The Rest of Now,” curated by Raqs Media Collective. I was at first fascinated by the curatorial concept of the “residue,” and the organizers’ intention to reflect on the disconnection between progress, normative narrations, and what remains untold when historians have finished their work. But what one got was an exhibition that seemed to say “welcome back to the ’90s”: generic discursive approaches, a vague rhetoric about participation, and the feeling that a tremendously serious agenda of issues stood, here, for an irresponsible acquisition of intellectual power. Only a few works transcended the general pall: Emre Hüner’s animated film Panoptikon (2005), a hypnotic atlas of symbols; Jorge Otero- Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust (2008), a monumental architecture of latex and residue from a disused wall; and Katerina Šedá’s Her Mistress’s Everything (2008), a delicate portrait of her grandmother’s infirmity where conceptual presentation overlapped with human fragility.
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