European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta 9 Genk, Limburg, Belgium 2012

PRESS
MANIFESTA 9 OPENS IN WATERSCHEI, GENK, BELGIUM

Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, is the only nomadic contemporary art biennial, showcasing work by artists and curators from Europe and beyond. Manifesta changes its location every two years in response to a variety of social, political and geographical considerations. Since 1996, it has been held in Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt, Donostia-San Sebastián, Nicosia (cancelled), Trentino-Alto Adige and the Region of Murcia. Manifesta 9 is open in Belgium from June 2 – September 30, 2012 and will take place in the former coalmining complex of Waterschei in Genk, Limburg, Belgium.

Since its first edition 16 years ago, Manifesta has been concerned with the idea of breaking down barriers, crossing borders and building bridges. Incorporating exhibitions, performances, multi-media experiments and broadcasts, Manifesta 9 highlights the very best of creative thought, research and experimentation, involving individual artists and artistic communities around the world.

MANIFESTA 9: CURATORIAL CONCEPT
The Deep of the Modern Manifesta 9 stages a dialogue between different layers of art, heritage and history. We propose an experience of contemporary art immersed in a dialogue across generations, geographies, time frames and social projects, as one of the forces that produce the world. Therefore, we have avoided the convention of the biennial as a mega-exhibition of contemporary art to create a focused montage of three components that echo, resonate and interact within the Waterschei mine building:

Poetics of Restructuring. Capitalism cannot exist without constantly revolutionising production, and thereby all social relations. Our ways of living, as well as our sensibility and subjectivity, are to a great extent the fleeting output (and the strata of residues) of the constant restructuring of the economic system. This section consists of aesthetic responses to the worldwide economic restructuring of the productive system in the early twentyfirst century, tracing developments in industrialism, post-industrialism, and shifting geographies and conditions of production in the era of global capitalism. By relating contemporary artworks with the encrypted meanings of the Waterschei historical building, this exhibition explores the way poetics relates to the shifting experience of labor, the geographical volatility of populations and industries, and the generalisation of material and intellectual processes that stir every quarter of the globe. Both empirically and enigmatically, artworks are witnesses to and sites of the poetic reworking of the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, the everlasting uncertainty and the agitation characteristic of the different industrial epochs.

The Age of Coal.
An Underground History of the Modern Although coal was one of the key factors that determined the transformations of social life and the natural landscape during the Industrial Era, we rarely consider it as a source of cultural energy. Such neglect owes to an aesthetic resistance toward coal mining, in combination with the ideologies that would isolate art from history. The Age of Coal offers a selection of artworks from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century to form an essay in the material art history of modernity. In ten chapters, we excavate the many ways coal as a fuel, as an environmental agent, as a fossil and as an industry shaped and conditioned artistic production.

17 Tons.
This section of the exhibition is an exploration of the cultural production powered by the energy of memory that runs through the diverse heirs of coal mining in Limburg and beyond. By transforming the title of one of the most famous coal miners’ songs – 16 Tons, recorded in 1946 by Merle Travis – 17 Tons ciphers the need of going one ton beyond the standard ideas about heritage. The show traces unexpected journeys through objects and documents kept in museums, as family treasures or in police archives, as well as a diversity of creative disciplines and traditions involved in a continuous exchange between the past and the future. Although the exhibition is divided into different sections – all brought together in this single building in Waterschei – there are thematic, poetic, and methodological

2 June – 30 September 2012 – Genk, Limburg, Belgium
The European Biennial of Contemporary Art – De Europese Biënnale voor Hedendaagse Kunst La Biennale Européenne d’Art Contemporain – Die Europäische Biennale für Zeitgenössische Kunst affinities that interlace the works of all three of its sections. The selection and organization of the exhibition aim to create resonances between the different levels and elements of the show across different times, genres and positions within the building. We hope that the contemporary artworks will provide novel insights into the art historical objects and heritage practices represented, and vice versa. In that sense The Deep of the Modern places its trust in the power of the exhibition and in the audience’s ability to make sense of the three exhibits by comparing and working through different elements of cultural production. Manifesta 9 proposes to redirect the course of Manifesta toward an advocacy of art production and historical knowledge as loci of aesthetic and social reflexivity and intergenerational responsibility. In that sense, the exhibition reflects the complex mediation of artworks, images, historical information and cultural institutions in the production of modern and post-industrial ways of thinking. The three sections attempt to explore the ways that art and culture are immanent to the social processes that both record and transform the outlook of specific social formations.

MANIFESTA 9: THE CURATORIAL TEAM
Head of the Curatorial Department is the Mexican curator Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina is critic, curator and art historian, holds a PHD in History and Theory of Art (PhD) from the University of Essex, UK and a degree in History from Universidad Autónoma de México. He is a research fellow at Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Medina was the first Associate Curator of Latin American Art in the collections of Tate Modern and curated events and exhibitions like When Faith moves Mountains with Francis Alÿs (Lima, Peru, 2001), The Age of Discrepancies. Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968-1997 (co-curated with O. Debroise, P. García & A. Vazquez, 2007-2008). In 2009 he curated What else could we talk about?, the project by Teresa Margolles presented at the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2010 he organised Dominó Caníbal, for PAC Murcia, Spain.

The other members of the curatorial team of Manifesta 9 are associate curators

Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades.

Katerina Gregos (born in Athens, Greece; based in Brussels, Belgium) is an art historian, curator and writer. She is currently curator of Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, Mechelen, Belgium. In 2011 she curated the Danish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, with Speech Matters, an international group exhibition on freedom of speech. That year she was also cocurator of the 4th Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen in Germany. In 2006/2007 she was the artistic director of Argos – Centre for Art & Media in Brussels and prior to that she was the founding director of the Deste Foundation – Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens. As an independent curator Gregos has also curated numerous international exhibitions , she regularly publishes on art and artists in magazines, books and exhibition catalogues, and is a frequent speaker in international conferences, biennials and museums worldwide. She is also a visiting lecturer at HISK – The Higher Institute of Arts, Antwerp.

Dawn Ades is a fellow of the British Academy, a former trustee of Tate and was awarded an OBE in 2002 for her services to art history. She has been responsible for some of the most important exhibitions in London and overseas over the past thirty years, including Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), Art in Latin America (1989) and Undercover Surrealism (2006). Dawn Ades has a remarkably wide knowledge of the social and poetic dynamics of modernism and the avant-garde both in Europe and the Americas.

LINK to Manifesta 9