++++ Two weeks before the start of documenta 11 in Cassel on 8 June, the European biennial, Manifesta 4, which takes place every two years in a different country, will open in Frankfurt.
Frankfurt. The announcement by the financial centre Frankfurt a year ago that it wanted to provide 1.3 million euros in order to host the European biennial, Manifesta, in the city in the year of the documenta 2002, caused some consternation. Was Frankfurt now trying to compete with documenta?
The General Co-ordinator, Martin Fritz, rejected these and similar ideas at a first programmatic press conference for Manifesta at the Frankfurt Kunstverein. There was no question of competing, he declared. In the first place, Manifesta had a good working relationship with the makers of documenta 11, and secondly, the exhibition was planned within a different, more modest framework. He rather saw the opportunity of Manifesta 4 benefiting from the almost simultaneous documenta 11, since many foreign visitors would travel to Cassel via Frankfurt. The exhibition would thus be offering itself as a junior partner to documenta.
Manifesta, which has previously taken place in Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Ljubljana, has a budget of 2.1 million euros. Revenues from the sale of admission tickets estimated at 15 to 20 thousand, were consciously budgeted low. Fritz explains that he would rather announce unexpected reports of success than have to concede that he had stimulated too high expectations.
The Frankfurt Manifesta wants to be a young, experimental, processual exhibition. The majority of the more than 70 artists and artists’ groups from more than 30 European countries is between 30 and 35 years of age. But the exhibition wants to be young not only in relation to the ages of the participants. In its conception it strives for processual happenings and dialogues among the artistic projects and with the venues where they will be shown. In the concept paper we read, "Manifesta will lay down tracks, blaze trails through the city of Frankfurt, uncovering contradictions of the present and showing how artists can redefine the classic relationship between space and time". For this reason there is not just one venue. Rather, the exhibition will occupy with its projects many places in urban space and create a network of interrelations among the locations including underground stations, the banks of the River Main and streets in the inner-city.
The main exhibition venue will be Frankensteiner Hof in Sachsenhausen, a vacant building of the Municipal Drainage Office which, with its various kinds of space (baths, workshops, garages, canteen) stimulates a critical engagement with the architecture. The Frankfurt Kunstverein is supposed to become the intellectual centre for Manifesta. Artists such as Christoph Fink and Bleda & Rosa will show their works there, which engage with the city and its history. Visitors will also be able to study the seven hundred artists’ dossiers which the three curators, Iara Boubnova, Nuria Enguita Mayo and Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley put together before selecting the participants to be invited.
Further venues will be the public space around the Schirn Kunsthalle, Portikus and the exhibition hall of the Städel Museum.
An exhibition place in Manifesta 4 can still be acquired, if only on a subletting basis. Christoph Büchel, an officially invited artist, will make his rights to participate available to the person who purchases them by auction by 29 March at the internet auctioneers, www.eBay.com. A unique opportunity for a well-heeled hobby artist.