Manifesta without a Manifesto? Artistic Statements in Times of Political Turbulence

Culture, Theory and Critique. 2021.

Kuleva M.

This paper seeks to explore the evolving form of art manifestos not as a single statement, but rather as a set of tactful performative actions that involve multiple agents and are developed over time. I examine performative manifestos by using the case of European Biennale Manifesta 10, held in St. Petersburg in 2014. This event was both the easternmost venue for the travelling Manifesta biennale alongside the first global-scale contemporary art exhibition held in St. Petersburg and Russia more broadly. As the organisers of Manifesta 10 confessed publicly, the political conditions for bringing Manifesta to St Petersburg in 2014 could not be worse. The recent approval of the anti-gay law by the Russian Parliament and the midst of the Ukrainian crisis including the Annexation of Crimea put the biennial into a very vulnerable position. An international petition to ban and boycott Manifesta by several artists, whose participation was already announced, heated up the existing tensions. Despite the negative setting, Manifesta opened for the public view with no theme or a clear statement. The absence of a manifesto was simply explained in the following way: the curator Kaspar König is primarily an artist and therefore his approach is different. Although Manifesta 10 did not produce a single declaration that could be clearly identified as a manifesto, König and the biennale team made a series of tactical visual and written statements for different audiences that helped Manifesta 10 overcome many of existing conflicts. The following paper aims to reconstruct this fragmented polyphonic manifesto produced by cultural workers, artists and visitors of the 2014 Manifesta Biennale into one cohesive written statement.

Keywords: Russia, cultural consumption, manifesto, cultural workers

Publication based on the results of: Дигитализируя невидимое: социальная история российского искусства XX века (2021)