Manifesta 5 opens in Donostia-San Sebastian with Marta Kuzma as co-creator (06/06/04)

Manifesta 5 opens in Donostia-San Sebastian with Marta Kuzma as co-creator

by Ika Koznarska Casanova

DONOSTIA-SAN SEBASTIÁN, Basque Country, Spain - Manifesta 5, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, opens on June 11 in Donostia-San Sebastián, the capital of the Gipuzkoa province, and in the city's old industrial port of Pasaia, with the participation of 56 invited artists from some 30 different countries.

The fifth in a series of exhibitions initiated by the Amsterdam-based Manifesta Foundation, the prominent cultural event, which has established itself on the international art scene since its first edition in 1996, will have a three-month run before closing on September 30.

Comprising the Manifesta 5 program, which was accorded an estimated budget of 2 million euros, are the art exhibition, related public projects and educational programming. Past exhibitions have been held in Rotterdam in 1996, in Luxembourg in 1998, in Ljubljana in 2000 and in Frankfurt in 2002.

Manifesta 5 is curated by the team of Marta Kuzma and Massimiliano Gioni.

Ms. Kuzma, an independent curator, is founding director of the Center of Contemporary Art in Kyiv, and former artistic director of the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran in Washington. She has also served as director of the international exhibitions program at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Mr. Gioni, art critic and curator, is artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan. He is former U.S. editor for Flash Art International and an editor of the renegade, artist-created magazine Charley. He also co-directs The Wrong Gallery on 20th Street in New York.

Mr. Gioni curated "The Zone" at the 50th Venice Biennial and is part of the curatorial team for the presentation of the latest acquisitions of the Dakis Joannou Collection in Athens.

He has worked on numerous exhibitions, including: "Uniform. Order and Disorder" (PS1, New York, 2001); "The Fourth Sex. Adolescent Extremes" (Pitti Discovery, Florence, 2002); and "Yesterday Begins Tomorrow" (Deste Foundation, Athens, 2003).

At the center of the formulation of the current Manifesta project was the search for a host city. Donostia-San Sebastián, with its distinct cultural and political identity, and its growing cultural and institutional infrastructure, was selected to host Manifesta 5, not so much as a setting but as an existing socio-political-cultural context.

Given the project's articulation, Manifesta 5 and the artists involved in the project can explore and respond to the inherent dynamic arising from the juxtaposition of what is termed "the historic bourgeois urban center" and the industrial, degraded peripheral area of the old port. In the process, they can consider various themes that relate art to contemporary realities and wider issues of the day.

The choice of the specific host city enabled the curators of the event, for their part, to relate the art event to wider social-cultural and public platforms. In their words, "Extending beyond the symmetry, order, homogeneity and leisure of Donostia-San Sebastián into the polemics of its neighboring Pasaia, Manifesta 5 aims at revealing the essence of something that is simultaneously economic, political, historical and aesthetic."

Apart from being used as exhibition space, the abandoned buildings of the industrial area of Pasaia will be put to use after the close of the exhibition and thus be instrumental in the recovery of sites and the general revitalization of the degraded area.

As conceived by the curatorial team, the project also entailed an investigation of the relationship between architecture and urbanism, as well as a feasibility study as to how cultural agents and artists may provide alternative solutions in reviving such areas as the port city of Pasaia in terms of their political, social and cultural development.

The investigation was conducted by Manifesta's research wing, the Office of Alternative Urban Planning (OAUP) in collaboration with the Berlage Institute, a Rotterdam-based post-graduate laboratory of architecture and urban research, directed by the architect Alejandro Zaera Polo.

While there is no one theme for the biennial, in outlining the general parameters of the exhibition, Ms. Kuzma referred to "an increasingly broadening list of concepts that are operative in contemporary art, such as individual memory, the strange European landscape or the opaque and enigmatic as a means to revealing the subtlety of 'the polemic' and its potential to transgress."

Eschewing overtly political art, Ms. Kuzma noted that "The fact that international media have been influenced by the tendency of the party in power to connect Basque issues with terrorism will inevitably be reflected in the works of the exhibiting artists in the sense that they will try to show that things are not simply black or white, but rather nuanced."

While not disclosing the contents of the projects, the predominance of work is in film and video, and work based on sculptural compositions. Of the 56 invited artists, 20 will create their work at the biennial, on site.

As a departure from previous events, the emphasis is not so much on emerging art as on how artists conceive of their work and its evolution within the framework of broad issues and concepts that are of relevance today. Thus, whereas previous exhibitions focused exclusively on young, emerging artists, Manifesta 5 will also feature well-known, established artists such as Bas Jan Ader, Gillian Wearing, Daniel Roth and John Bock.

In terms of the shift in focus, the British writer and critic Martin Herbert, in a recent entry on Manifest 5 in Artforum, noted the following: "What's critical here, it seems, is to get the 'right' art - art whose hieroglyphic subtlety might reflect how polemics are encoded in images, institution and social dynamics - rather than the newest."

In terms of diversity of geographic representation, participating artists come from some 30 countries.

Germany, with 14 artists, leads with the greatest number of entries, followed by the United Kingdom, which will be represented by seven artists, the Basque Country by four and Spain, by five artists.

Taking part are three artists from Russia and one artist each from the Czech Republic, Romania, Lithuania and Estonia.

There are four artists from Ukraine taking part in the exhibition namely, Boris Mikhailov, Iliya Chichkan, Kyrill Protsenko and Sergey Bratkov.

A full catalogue of the exhibition will include artists' representation and contributions, the manual produced by the OAUP, and introductory essays by each of the curators, Andrew Benjamin, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, Dan Graham and Peter Osborne, with additional essays in relation to OAUP by Mr. Zaera Polo and Sebastian Khourian.

* * *

An independent curator, Marta Kuzma is founding director of the Soros Center of Contemporary Art in Kyiv, and former artistic director of the Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran [Gallery] in Washington (WPA/C) and director of the international exhibitions program at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.

As founding director of the SCCA in Kyiv, Ms. Kuzma implemented the first independent program of contemporary art within Ukraine as part of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art network across the former Soviet bloc. During her tenure at SCCA (1993-1999), the center set up a permanent gallery at the Kyiv- Mohyla University.

As director of the SCCA Gallery, she curated numerous exhibitions, including "Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective" (1966); "Alchemic Surrender," an exhibition held aboard the nuclear battleship Slavutych in Sevastopol, Crimea (1994); and "The Crimean Project," which was held in Livadia Palace (1998).

As the artistic director of WPA/C (2003-2004), she undertook the revision of the WPA/C program to reinvigorate its critical role as an off-sites contemporary art organization with an international focus and interdisciplinary program development addressing the production of art in relation to the city, urban structuring and public space as specific to Washington. She also reinitiated the program with "The Mutable Monument," an international project approaching revisions in the notion of monument.

From 1989 to 1992, Ms. Kuzma directed the international exhibitions program at the International Center of Photography in New York.

She has served on the jury of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) panel for artist residency for 2003 and 2004.

Ms. Kuzma was born and grew up in New Jersey. She is a graduate of Barnard College in New York (1986), with a B.A. in political economy and art history, and of Middlesex University, London, where she earned an M.A. in aesthetics and art theory (2002).

At present, she is also curating a project with Dan Graham titled "Passaic," which is to open in New York City this year.

* * *

The information below, regarding the participation of artists from Ukraine in Manifesta 5, was provided by Marta Kuzma.

Contemporary art arriving out of countries formerly constituted as Eastern Europe was nearly immediately placed within trends and tendencies apparent in Western Europe and North America. Unfortunately, the contemporary art world failed to understand what could possibly constitute a modernism following the end of the Soviet Union.

It's far too easy to say there were no modernist tendencies in these countries under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. ...Our attempt in Manifesta was to try to review what constituted the makings of desire, of the wish to approach the cultural, and within which frame under a Soviet system outside the art systems.

In feeling oneself a dissident, even if spiritually, it was not likely that a person would go seek out protest in the art system on a very apparent level. The need for expression would be sought out in other more transgressive ways.

The selection of artists from Ukraine came out of this logic, namely, to present a series of works that interact to convey a logic of that time, to contrast personal systems of seeking out a poetic that was perhaps not as political and apparent.

The artists from Ukraine who have been invited to participate in Manifesta 5 are Boris Mikhailov, Iliya Chichkan, Kyrill Protsenko and Sergey Bratkov.

The work of Boris Mikhailov (born in 1938 in Kharkiv) is very well known internationally via numerous exhibitions and monographs presenting photographic series dating from the late 1960s. Mikhailov's name is synonymous with the epitome of the Soviet landscape and, at this point in time, he is already regarded as a classic.

I have worked with Mikhailov for nearly 10 years, having curated his first retrospective at the SCCA in Kyiv in 1996. For Manifesta, it was important for artist and curator to return to some earlier less represented work from the late 1970s, more minimal than the artist's monumental color and figurative photography of late. In these black and white urban landscapes from Kharkiv in the 1970s and 1980s, there is a seeking out of the landscape that is prompted by an internal yearning to find the expression in the seemingly banal, mundane and regimented. The work speaks emphatically in its near silence and it tells us more about the anesthetized voice of that period.

Kyiv-born artists Iliya Chichkan and Kyrill Protsenko (both born in 1967), have extended the project they began and presented at the Manifesta presentation during the Venice Bienale. The film, compiled from archival fragments of trailer films within the Kyiv Film Archive, refers to the films that had been screened in theaters prior to the screening of Soviet Cinema. These films include footage of political delegations first arriving in Kyiv from Fidel Castro's Cuba, from African countries, well-known sports events, national dance and skating events, fashion shows in Kyiv under Stalin and Khrushchev. From this engaging footage it is possible to understand how media became more open and then closed, and how public opinion was gauged against this.

Sergey Bratkov (born in 1960) is an artist from Kharkiv who has worked closely with Mr. Mikhailov throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Although his work was closely associated with Mikhailov, Bratkov has pursued an independent career with an independent oeuvre that provides a closer look at children in Ukraine. It is a critical look in presenting images that point to the proliferation of the baby trade out of Ukraine, and also to the neglected children in orphanages and hostels.

The work of the four participating artists from Ukraine will not be exhibited together, but separately in various venues along with the work of the other 52 artists in Manifesta.

Note: Mr. Mikhailov now resides in Berlin following receipt of a one-year DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) grant in 2000; Mr. Chichkan currently resides in Berlin for the one-year DAAD grant. Mr. Bratkov lives in Moscow.

* * *

Messrs. Bratkov, Chichkan and Mikhailov were among participating artists in the several exhibitions and projects curated by Ms. Kuzma, among others: "Collecting Fact/Interpreting Fiction" (1999), a traveling exhibition of photography sponsored by Apollonia European Art Exchanges; "The Future is Now" (1999), Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; and "The Crimean Project" (1998).

Mr. Mikhailov's first retrospective, titled "Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective," SCCA Gallery, Kyiv (1996), included work from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s, including the following important series: "Luriki," "Sots Art," "Crimean Snobbism," "U Sumerki," "U Zemli," "I Am Not I," "Berdyansk," "Salt Lake Series," a specially commissioned "Booth of the National Hero" and the first exhibition with English translation of "Uncompleted Dissertation."

The exhibition "Iliya Chichkan. Milk in Lieu of Harm," was presented at the XXIII Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1994). Mr. Chichkan was also among the participating artists in "Alchemic Surrender. Battleship Slavutych" exhibition held in 1994 in Sevastopol.

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