Manifesta

Manifesta's most distinctive structural feature is the one that distinguishes it most sharply from every other biennial in the European institutional field. Venice has been fixed in the Giardini and the Arsenale since 1895. documenta has been fixed in Kassel since 1955. The Berlin Biennale, founded 1998, has been fixed in Berlin's gallery and institutional infrastructure since. Manifesta is the only major contemporary European biennial whose institutional premise is that it should be hosted by a different city in every edition — and the only one whose constituting question is not, what should this edition of the biennial argue, but, what should this edition of Europe argue.

The premise was a post-1989 one. Manifesta was conceived in 1993 by the Dutch art historian Hedwig Fijen and a small group of European curators, in response to a European institutional condition that had been fundamentally reorganised by the fall of the Berlin Wall four years earlier. The Cold War geography on which Venice and documenta had been organised — the postwar division between a Western European institutional sphere with strong international biennial infrastructure and an Eastern European cultural sphere that the Western institutions could engage only obliquely — had ceased to obtain. What the new European cultural geography would be was the open institutional question Manifesta was founded to address; the nomadic model was the institutional argument that the question could not be answered from any single European capital.

The continuing institutional question the model has raised is whether "European" is now a category that can be programmed coherently at all. The first nine editions — Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt, San Sebastián, Nicosia (cancelled), Trentino-South Tyrol, Murcia/Cartagena, and the Genk-Limburg edition sited in the post-industrial coal-mining infrastructure of the former Waterschei colliery — were programmed substantially across European peripheries rather than European capitals, and the institutional argument they made together was that the post-1989 European condition was being lived more consequentially at the periphery than at the centre. The 2014 St Petersburg edition tested whether "European" could continue to include a Russia that was at that moment annexing Crimea; the 2022 Prishtina edition tested whether "European" could include Kosovo in the absence of universal EU recognition; the 2024 Barcelona edition tested whether "European" could continue to mean anything coherent in a city whose principal continuing political condition is the conflict between Catalan autonomy and the Spanish state.

The 2006 Nicosia cancellation remains the institution's principal historical crisis — and the one against which every subsequent edition has been programmed. The Cypriot government's withdrawal of support six months before the scheduled opening, in response to the curators' intention to organise components of the exhibition across both sides of the divided Green Line, was a categorical failure of the institutional premise: the cancellation was the moment at which the nomadic model encountered a host political condition the institution could not negotiate. The institution survived; the cancellation produced an extensive secondary literature including Anton Vidokle's Notes for an Art School (2006); the working institutional question Nicosia raised — whether the nomadic premise can be sustained against host states with sovereignty conditions that the model presupposes can be set aside — has been continuing institutional argument in every edition since.

The institutional record so far is that the model has, despite the 2006 failure and the 2014 controversy, produced thirty years of European biennial programming at consistently substantial institutional weight, and the 2026 Ruhr edition will extend the nomadic premise from single host cities to the multi-city metropolitan region — the structural argument being that a post-2020 European condition is more consequentially programmed across regions than across single municipal jurisdictions. Whether the model continues to be the institutional argument that the post-1989 condition required is the editorial question that each Manifesta cycle continues to answer.