This is not a Church

 

The Nomadic Biennial and Its Genesis 

"A nomadic biennial is a productive contradiction: art that refuses to have a home, to remind us that we too might not have one." — Boris Groys 

To understand what is at stake, one must return to the origins of Manifesta. Conceived in 1993 by Dutch art historian Hedwig Fijen together with a small group of European curators, the biennial took shape in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War — not the one fought with weapons, but the one of ideology, of which the Berlin Wall had been both monument and prison. The fall of the Wall in 1989 had not simply unified a continent: it had opened up, and at the same time made urgent, the question of what Europe should culturally become. Manifesta was born as a response to this vertigo: not a fair, not a biennial in the Venetian sense of the term (institutional, national, competitive), but a nomadic platform that refuses a fixed residence, and with it any claim to centrality. 

The first edition was held in Rotterdam in 1996. Since then, on a biennial cycle, Manifesta has moved through Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt, San Sebastián, Trentino-Alto Adige, Murcia, Genk, St Petersburg — the controversial 2014 edition, whose presence in a Russia already aggressive towards Ukraine sparked heated controversy — then Zurich, Palermo, Marseille, Pristina. Sixteen editions, sixteen cities or regions chosen not for their centrality within the contemporary art system, but often for their eccentricity with respect to it: places in transition, post-industrial spaces, geographies forgotten by canonical circuits. The Ruhr, with its identity forged in coal and steel, could not be more consistent with this vocation. 

The Ruhrpott: Geography of an Idea 

The name Ruhr derives from the river of the same name, a tributary of the Rhine that flows through the region from east to west. But "Ruhrpott" — as its inhabitants affectionately call it, evoking a workers' cauldron, an industrial pot in which the labour force of half of Europe was fused for decades — is something more than a place name. It is an identity. The Ruhr basin was, in the twentieth century, the engine of Germany's postwar "economic miracle", an urban constellation of mines, steelworks and factories that drew successive waves of migrant workers: from Poland in the nineteenth century, then from Italy, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia. Today, with the mines closed and heavy industry almost entirely dismantled, the region bears the marks of that unfinished transition afflicting many post-industrial European territories: demographic decline, political polarisation, the unsettling rise of an AfD that in Gelsenkirchen's local elections now runs neck and neck with the SPD. 

It is in this setting that Manifesta 16 takes root — not as an artistic cosmetic for a social wound, but, in its intentions at least, as a practice of collective working-through. 

Twelve Churches, Four Cities: The Architecture of Dispersion 

The biennial's spatial arrangement is itself a critical act. Twelve deconsecrated or underused churches, spread across Bochum, Essen, Duisburg and Gelsenkirchen: four distinct cities, bound by industrial history but separated by distances that make visiting a far from passive undertaking. For those arriving from outside — and the biennial addresses, at least in its ambitions, an international audience — experiencing Manifesta 16 in its entirety means facing a logistics closer to a secular pilgrimage than a museum stroll. The venues within the same city are often at considerable distances from one another, not walkable, and navigating between the four cities requires public transport, a car, or a healthy dose of determination. There is something deliberately anti-spectacular in this choice: Manifesta does not present itself as a product to be consumed in an afternoon, but as a territory to be traversed over time, with patience. 

And yet within this dispersion there also lies an unresolved tension. The admirable ambition to take root in neighbourhoods — to make the churches not temporary galleries but "infrastructures for the surrounding communities", as the official texts declare — runs up against the reality of a visitor who, backpack over one shoulder and transport app in hand, passes through places without the slowness needed to truly inhabit them. The risk is what Mark Fisher might have called a "hauntology of good intentions": the image of a community proximity evoked but never fully embodied. 

It should be noted, however, that entry is free at all twelve venues — a rare and significant choice in the landscape of major international biennials. 

Pantoffelkirchen: The Slipper Churches and Their End 

The churches of the Ruhr have a particular history. In the immediate postwar years, the region's massive reconstruction was accompanied by an equally massive programme of church-building. The so-called Pantoffelkirchen — literally "slipper churches", reachable without even lacing up one's shoes — sprang up as outposts of a community attempting to suture itself back together after the bombings. Postwar urban planning incorporated residential dispersal as a strategy of resilience against air raids: each neighbourhood was to be self-sufficient, and the church was its gravitational centre. To build was to be reborn, and the modernist architecture of these buildings — often magnificent in their geometric rigour, their cold luminosity — carried within itself a rhetoric of renewal that today appears at once noble and tragically dated. 

The very title of Manifesta 16 is in dialogue with this history. "This is not a church" is not merely a conceptual provocation: it is the acknowledgement of a fact. These churches are no longer churches, not in the full sense of the word. Congregations have dwindled, secularisation has emptied the pews, and it is estimated that over the next decade some twenty thousand religious buildings in Germany will be deconsecrated. What remains when the sacred withdraws? A space — architecturally powerful, laden with symbolic strata — in search of a new function. Art, in this case, is less the solution than the device of interrogation. 

The Programme: From "Creative Mediation" to the Works 

"Images in spite of all: this is art's wager in the face of the unspeakable." — Georges Didi-Huberman 

Manifesta 16 has chosen not to have curators in the traditional sense, but "creative mediators" (Kreative Vermittler): a terminological choice that emphasises the relational and processual dimension over the authorial one. In this edition, the creative mediators — among them Leonie Herweg, René Block and Gürsoy Doğtaş — have worked with 107 artists from more than 25 countries, with 67 new commissions among 107 total participants. Germany, Poland and Turkey are the most strongly represented countries, and this is not a neutral choice: they reflect the region's migratory layers, the history of the Gastarbeiter, the communities that built Germany's economic miracle while remaining for a long time invisible to official cultural representation. 

Luc Tuymans has installed in Bochum, in the Christ-König church built in 1932 as Nazism was ascending to power, a monumental textile frieze (KINO, 2026) that reworks algorithmically colourised scenes from Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935). The red flags turn blue, the swastikas disappear: what remains is a visual structure of the sacred and of power, stripped of its ideological referents. Tuymans speaks of a "vacuum" — and the vacuum, in a church that is no longer a church, is the most honest condition of possibility. 

Abbas Zahedi has brought into the nave of Duisburg's Kulturkirche Liebfrauen a sound installation (Ouranophobia 47051, 2026) composed of orphaned organ pipes, salvaged from dismantled or damaged instruments across Europe — some from the Church of St Nicholas in Kyiv. Their form involuntarily recalls Patriot missile systems: the organ as weapon, music as absence, silence as the reverberation of war. Rarely has a space spoken so explicitly of its own wound. 

Gürsoy Doğtaş, creative mediator in Gelsenkirchen and himself the son of migrant workers, expanded the names of the churches to include the histories of their neighbourhoods: St Bonifatius becomes St Bonifatius – Ferdane Satır Tea Garden, in honour of a Duisburg resident murdered in a racist arson attack in 1984. A minimal, nominal gesture — and yet one of extraordinary density: the name as an act of memory, the plaque as counter-toponymy of grief. 

Elizabeth Price presented two works in sequence — an existing piece, HERE WE ARE (2025), and a new commission, WHERE ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU (2026) — as a meditation on the architecture of modernist churches as an "expression of postwar trauma". In the second work, a drone flies through the interior of Essen's Marienkirche — built on the ruins of the church destroyed in the bombings — while literary accounts of aerial bombardment in Germany and England scroll across the screen. The image of a drone exploring the interior of a postwar church is itself a temporal condensation: the trauma that is never truly "post". 

The Logistical Challenge: Visiting Manifesta as Pilgrimage 

Visiting Manifesta 16 requires, it must be said plainly, time and a certain willingness to exert oneself. This is not an exhibition gathered under a single roof, nor a museum with wings connected by corridors. Each city has its own constellation of churches, and even within the same city the distances do not allow for easy walking. For a visitor arriving from outside the region, the undertaking may require two or three days to be approached with the attention it deserves. Those expecting the fluidity of a major museum institution will find themselves disoriented. Those who accept instead to move as if on a journey — with stops, detours, unexpected encounters — will find in this dispersion a poetic coherence of its own: that of art which allows itself to be encountered, not consumed. 

There is something almost programmatically anti-spectacular in all this. In an era when major biennials tend to concentrate masses of visitors into hangars transformed into experiential temples, Manifesta 16 distributes the experience across space and time, imposing slowness. This is not a flaw — it is a position. 

Female Bodies, Proper Names and the Violence That Has No Past 

In Gelsenkirchen, more than elsewhere, Manifesta 16 confronts gender-based violence not as an abstract theme but as a concrete, named wound. The most powerful gesture by creative mediator Gürsoy Doğtaş — himself the son of migrant workers — was to change the names of the churches: not with artistic or conceptual titles, but with the names of real women, who lived and were often forgotten by the official account. 

St Bonifatius, a deconsecrated 1963 church in the Erle district, becomes Ferdane Satır Tea Garden. Ferdane Satır was a Duisburg resident murdered in a racist arson attack in 1984 — one of many acts of violence against Turkish communities in 1980s Germany, crimes that German public opinion took decades to fully acknowledge. Her name, placed at the entrance to a church, functions as an inverted memorial plaque: not on a gravestone, but on a vital, open, frequented space. It is an act of symbolic restitution — the name of a murdered woman returning to occupy the urban space that was taken from her through violence. 

Inside St Bonifatius, the work of Nil Yalter is on display — a Turkish-French artist and an absolute pioneer of European feminist art. Her practice, which since the 1970s has documented the living conditions of migrant women — their bodies, their labour, their systemic invisibility — finds here an additional density. The church dedicated to Ferdane Satır houses the work of an artist who has made the denunciation of structural violence against women the central axis of her practice: the dialogue between the name on the door and the work on the walls is itself an undeclared artwork — perhaps the most powerful in the entire biennial. 

Nearby, the Thomaskirche is renamed Hava Güleç Living Room. Inside, a dough-scraper brought from Turkey — an anonymous tool of daily labour — is presented as testimony to "a woman, a worker, a bearer of knowledge that no system recognises". The violence evoked here is not that of physical aggression, but the more pervasive and structural violence of invisibilisation: the female, migrant body that works without being seen, that transmits knowledge without being heard, that inhabits spaces without leaving traces in the official registers of culture. That Hava Güleç's name should end up inscribed on the sign of a church in a working-class district of Gelsenkirchen is, on reflection, a form of justice — minimal, symbolic, and nonetheless real. 

This thread — connecting the racist violence of 1984 to the invisibilised female body, from the arson attack to the dough-scraper — runs quietly through the entire Gelsenkirchen programme, suggesting that the history of the Ruhrpott was never only a history of mines and steelworks, but above all a history of female bodies upon which Germany's economic miracle was built, and that the memory of those bodies remains unfinished work. 

Unresolved Tensions and Possible Voids 

Not everything functions impeccably. The rhetoric of "community transformation" that permeates the biennial's official texts does not always find correspondence in the exhibited works, which in most cases follow a conventional exhibition model, far removed from the integrated urban intervention the subtitle promises. The absence of German translations in many of the videos on display — paradoxical for an event addressed to local communities — has been noted by the more attentive critics. And the controversy surrounding the alleged resemblance between Nasan Tur's installation Elevation (vertically erected church pews) and a 2010 work by Bochum sculptor Dorothee Bielfeld (Aufrichten) has raised questions about how much attention was paid to the local artistic context before commissioning new works from international artists. 

What remains, however, is something genuinely moving in the image of these modernist churches — built as acts of hope after destruction, inhabited for decades by migrant communities who brought to them their faiths and their weary bodies — now hosting works of art that attempt to come to terms with that very history. The church is no longer a church, but neither is it simply a gallery. It is a space of transition — like the region that contains it, like the Europe that the biennial continues, edition after edition, to attempt to imagine. 

"Art does not resolve problems — it makes them impossible to ignore." — Arthur Miller 

Manifesta 16 Ruhr: This is not a church Bochum, Essen, Duisburg, Gelsenkirchen 21 June – 4 October 2026 Free admission — manifesta16.org