Manifesta without a manifesto? Artistic statements in times of political turbulence

ABSTRACT

This paper seeks to explore the evolving form of art manifestos in the contemporary cultural economy by bringing perspectives of those cultural producers who cannot speak up in the conventional form of a manifesto. I examine this issue by using the case of European Biennial Manifesta 10, held in Saint Petersburg in 2014. As the organisers of Manifesta 10 confessed publicly, the political conditions for bringing Manifesta to Russia could not be worse. The recent approval of the anti-gay law and the midst of the Ukrainian crisis including the annexation of Crimea put the Biennale into a very vulnerable position. Despite severe calls for boycott, Manifesta opened for the public view with no theme or a clear statement. 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 alternative tactical visual and written statements for different audiences. By using the author's interpretation, the following paper aims to reconstruct this fragmented polyphonic manifesto produced by cultural workers, artists and visitors of the 2014 Manifesta Biennale.

KEYWORDS:

• art boycott
• art manifesto
• cultural work
• invisibility
• Manifesta Biennale

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data available within the article or its supplementary materials

Notes

1 I express gratitude to my students (Sasha Shanina, Marta Anson, Lena Penina, Nika Akimova, Anastasia Pogorelova and Robin Mitchell) from Digital Art History group for their help in data collection and visualisation.

2 The latest version of the article is dated February 2023, a year after Putin started the war in Ukraine and 9 years since Manifesta 10 took place.

3 As, for instance, in Manifesta 7 and 9 (Moons et al. 2013) (see also Lange 2008).

4 In particular, the law on ‘fake news’, introduced on 22 March 2022, criminalises dissemination of so-called false information about all Russian state bodies operating abroad, with fines of 1.5 million rubles (around 20,000 USD) and prison sentences of up to 15 years.

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Margarita Kuleva

Dr Margarita Kuleva is a researcher, artist and curator. She is based in New York and works as a postdoc at NYU Jordan Center. She is interested in exploring social inequalities in cultural and knowledge production. In her research and art projects she mainly uses ethnography and performance as methods. In particular, her PhD was devoted to the ‘behind the scenes’ of cultural institutions to give greater visibility for the invisible workers of culture. Some findings from these studies are presented in recent journal publications, including Cultural Studies (2018) and European Journal of Cultural Studies (2022).