Manifesta 2006
frieze asked critics and curators from around the world to choose what they were looking forward to in 2006
Will Bradley
The World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures, http://wsfii.org, and Node London, http://www.nodel.org
Suzanne Cotter
Cerith Wyn Evans’ retrospective at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris; Pierre Huyghe at Tate Modern and Andrea Zittel at the New Museum in the USA; and Catherine David’s third project in her series of exhibitions, publications and lectures addressing cultural production in the Arab world, ‘Contemporary Arab Representations: The Iraqi Equation’.
Peter Eleey
Santiago Sierra is rumoured to be working on a large project collaborating with ‘untouchables’ in India, which he hopes to present sometime this year. Ralph Rugoff’s ‘A Brief History of Invisible Art’ promises a new take on ephemerality. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno will be releasing their film on French footballer Zinédine Zidane in the lead-up to the World Cup, and the young Brazilian Nicolau Vergueiro has new work at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles in the spring.
Paulo Herkenhoff
Lisette Lagnado will bring curatorial density, aesthetic discernment and intellectual rigour to the 27th San Paulo Biennial. She has an eye for the cutting edge, has travelled extensively around Brazil and gathered together a fine group of co-curators. However, the 2006 World Cup means periods without art. During the Brazilian matches you will not find a single Brazilian in front of any work of art anywhere in the world. We are 180 million geometers waiting for the sublime: the sphere within the rectangle of our contender. This is called football-art.
Matthew Higgs
Along with Berlin Biennial, I’m also looking forward to ‘Day for Night’, the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Organized for the first time by two non-Americans – the (British) Curator of Contemporary art at the Whitney, Chrissie Iles, and the Walker Art Center’s (French) Deputy Director and Senior Curator, Philippe Vergne – the stakes are high for what remains the most hotly contested curatorial turf in the USA. We should expect a highly idiosyncratic and provocative exhibition that will, no doubt, be full of surprises and
(re-)discoveries, all underpinned by a sense of serious play.
Maxine Kopsa
Manifesta 6. A new ideology, a new dogma?
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
Spring in Scotland promises shows by Al Ruppersberg at Dundee’s DCA (one of the most consistently thoughtful programmes in Britain) and the late Fred Sandback at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh. Beatrix Ruf’s Tate Triennial, a view of British art from without, will offer an intriguing complement to the view from within provided by the ongoing tour of British Art Show 6, while Manifesta 6 in Nicosia and this year’s Whitney Biennial excite the usual anticipation. A personal list of desiderata would have to include a critical account of current German painting that avoids the pitfalls of breathless boosterism, a substantial British outing for peripatetic Irishman Gerard Byrne, and a nicely catholic show by the newly Gagosianized Mike Kelley at an (in)appropriate venue in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Chus Martinez
Wilhelm Sasnal’s solo exhibition at Berkeley Art Museum will include new paintings as well as a film featuring rock bands from the Bay Area; I am also looking forward to Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas’ exhibition at MACBA in Barcelona, and Manifesta 6.
Tom Morton
The Wrong Gallery’s Berlin Biennial and Manifesta 6. Charles Avery’s unfurling of the second chapter of his lifelong ‘Islanders’ project at Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin, promises complex philosophical pleasures, while Roger Hiorns’ show at the Milton Keynes Gallery will shed institutional light on this most intelligently sensuous of sculptors. Perhaps the most exciting work of 2006, though, is that which for now remains unmade.
Daniel Palmer
Brisbane will celebrate the opening of the Australian Cinémathèque and the new Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Melbourne, will be plagued by Commonwealth Games-related art projects for the first few months; big events will be the National Gallery of Victoria’s ‘Commonwealth Contemporary’ and the biennial Next Wave Festival’s ‘Empire Games’. In March, Linda Michael curates the 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art with ‘21st Century Modern’. Between June and August Charles Merewether presents his version of the 15th Biennial of Sydney, ‘Zones of Contact’, on relations between people shaped by memories and recent traumatic histories.
Emily Pethick
Issues around art education are paramount so next year I am looking forward to the continuation of projects and discussions around art education and am curious about Manifesta 6’s attempt to set up an experimental art school in Nicosia.
Nancy Spector
If the opening of the bootleg Gagosian Gallery in Berlin is an indication of the irreverence to come, the Berlin Biennial promises a fresh take on the exhibition genre.
Polly Staple
Biennials. Europe and the Middle East.
Jan Verwoert
Exhibition policy at the moment seems very much divided between biennials, symposia and themed shows focusing on content and context, and galleries and collections capitalizing on questions of form and aesthetics. To find a language and create exhibition scenarios that harness the potential of artistic form for a contextual debate is something that is much needed.
Tirdad Zolghadr
Anything at the Tensta Konsthall which is located in a suburb of Stockholm and run by an ebullient trio of curator/directors who act like happy artists. Also, ‘Broken Borders’ at MoMA, New York. The press release asks of it ‘is possible to speak of a contemporary art with an Islamic difference?’ Unnamed contemporary artists ‘from the Islamic World’ living in Europe and the USA are assembled as the perfunctory Muslim troupe. Is it possible to speak of curatorial laziness and ethnic marketing? Is it possible to speak of ‘Islamic difference’ – stretching from Nigeria to Bosnia to India to China to Indonesia – existing as an aestheticized essence only in the minds of clerics and the sales strategies of metropolitan venues? Roll out the wigwams. Bring on the Nubians. This will be a blast.
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
