++++ The pub district, Alt-Sachsenhausen, is largely unknown terrain for many Frankfurt residents, or at least an area which they have not visited for years. With addresses such as Kleine Rittergasse, Paradiesplatz and Klappergass', the district is a collection of urban miniatures with a romantic flavour and too much plastic grape decoration, too much Anton from Tyrol and too many little liqueur bottles with which you have to bang on the table when your glass is empty.
But after all, they are part of the city, the Alt-Sachsenhausen populace, and therefore it will also be a part of Manifesta 4 because the fourth biennial for contemporary European art, which is taking place this time in Frankfurt and will open on the evening of 24 May, has the theme of urban contexts. The encounter of curious pub-goers with the exhibition is one of the many interfaces between urban life and young, mainly socio-politically oriented art from all over Europe.
With his installation, Sancho Silva enables non-authorized people, that is, those without a Manifesta ticket, to have a look at Frankensteiner Hof.
Since the former municipal bureau, where at the moment there are still lots of ladders and buckets of paint in the corridors, has never before been used as a theatre, a certain basic curiosity among the local passers-by is already guaranteed. But the bunker which they enter puts them in the conspicuous position of uninvited onlookers, a staging which can be transferred to the macro-political context and also the smallest private unit, even to the politics of exhibitions itself.
With her controversial action Free Manifesta, Sal Randolph also targets this staging. The American artist acquired her participation rights at the internet auctioneer eBay, where the Swiss artist, Christoph Büchel, sold his rights as exhibitor to the highest bidder. For Randolph it was worth more than seventeen thousand euros to indiscriminately call on artists to join in under the aura of an act of liberation, although it is fully underwritten by the Manifesta organization.
With their works, many of the participants in Manifesta engage with the theme of Manifesta itself. Thus, Ioan Godeanu, who appears under the name The Construction and Deconstruction Institute, visualizes the fact that through his art he was catapulted from Romania to Frankfurt in the form of a container which will stand in front of the Schirn Kunsthalle during the three-month exhibition as if it had been parachuted off a plane.
For many of the roughly eighty participating artists and groups, Manifesta is their first exhibition. To exhibit them at such an early stage of their development induced the three Manifesta curators to make do without an overarching theme and to allow them complete liberty with regard to content. Nevertheless, most works have some relation to social themes which are in part specific to Frankfurt and in part have global relevance.
The exhibition spaces have all been allotted and most of the artists are already setting up, some of them for the past several weeks. The Icelander, Anna Gudmundsdottir, is currently working in a kind of ivory tower. She has painted the round gallery in the new Städel building in a flesh colour and is painting the walls with illustrations from old medical books, instruction manuals and other publications containing non-artistic graphics. Jesus with a broom, for instance, or a woman in a gynaecologist's chair with an electric cord between her legs interweave with fragments of texts rich in associations which evoke complex worlds of images.
Apart from the exhibition rooms in Frankensteiner Hof, Manifesta is taking place at Portikus, Städel, the Frankfurt Kunstverein and various places in the public domain. Dialogue with the city's residents, and not only with the expected one hundred thousand visitors interested in art, is expressly welcomed.
Måns Wrange can surely say what normal citizens think about it. On the basis of numerous statistics which have been collected, the Swedish artist has composed a profile of the average citizen and has even found someone who embodies all the statistical averages.
The biennial art exhibition Manifesta starts on 24 May at 8 p.m. at Römerberg with a big opening event and will run until 25 August.