The organisers of this year’s Manifesta can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the seventh edition of the European biennial of contemporary art is actually happening. After the trauma of the eleventh hour cancellation of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus due to an eruption of local sensitivities, it is somewhat of a miracle that the biennial is back from the brink. Beyond just happening, Manifesta 7, which takes place in the mountainous Italian provinces of Trentino and South Tyrol, is an attempt to return to the spiritual roots and sense of mission of the ‘Manifesta Decade’ and restore its tarnished credibility. Manifesta 7 steers well clear of politics, which is understandable given that the curatorial desire to foster peace between Turkish and Greek Cypriots in Nicosia backfired so disastrously. Consequently, the concepts of the four exhibitions that make up the Biennial, curated by Adam Budak, Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, and the Raqs Media Collective, deal with abstract notions of regionalism, European identity and the residues of industrial culture.

Adam Budak’s exhibition, entitled ‘Principle Hope’, is spread between a disused tobacco factory and a former cocoa plant in Rovereto, and derives from the idea of hope as ‘dreaming forward’ and the implications of critical regionalist theory. The Manifattura Tabacchi is the most rundown of the venues, and many of the most effective works in the show acknowledge the material history of the building. Such is the case with Claire Fontaine’s light-box Visions of the World, Rovereto, which records an anonymous pencil sketch from the walls of the factory depicting sunset over the surrounding mountains at the winter equinox in the late 1960s. In Guido van der Werve’s mesmerizing film Nummer Acht, Everything is Going to be Alright the artist walks a few steps ahead of an icebreaker across the frozen Finnish sea, suggesting the persistence of a fragile hope in the face of unimaginable odds. Among the many attempts to connect with the local legacy of Futurism, Uqbar Foundation researched the Futurist archive of MART, Rovereto’s impressive new museum of contemporary art, for their installation Fuga di un Piano that touches on the modernist fascination with African masks.  

The other Rovereto venue, Ex-Peterlini, was recently reclaimed from local anarchists, and the history of the squat provides a point of reference for a number of artists. Miklós Erhardt and Little Warsaw transpose the group dynamics of a local Italian autonomist cell into a fictionalised Hungarian context in a film entitled La Nave del Folli, which points to the inaccessibility of past revolutionary scenarios. Claire Fontaine’s neon sign We Are With You in the Night repeats Italian graffiti of the 1970s showing solidarity with imprisoned leftwing activists, and is further suggestive of the powerlessness and invisibility of radical politics in contemporary society. Igor Eškinja sidesteps such concerns in his meticulous use of simple materials to conceptual effect, creating street lamps from adhesive tape and an elegant carpet made from sand in Project for Untitled Piece.

Anselme Franke and Hila Peleg were allocated a former post office in Trento, the nearest venue to a white cube, but also the most challenging due to its maze of small airless rooms. The Council of Trent that launched the Counter-Reformation was held here in the Sixteenth Century, and ‘The Soul’takes as its starting point the doctrine that confession should include the innermost thoughts and fantasies of the believer. Among many outstanding works, Rosalind Nashashibi’s The Prisoner involves a single film reel looping through two adjacent projectors, with the resulting time lag between the two images enough to render an unknown woman’s journey around the Southbank Centre sinister and fascinating. In what is perhaps an overly dense deployment of wall and film works within the constricted space of the Palazzo delle Poste, the curators chose to place the accent on five interdisciplinary ‘mini-museums’. By far the most successful of these quasi-scientific meditations on normality, madness, learning, testing and images is the Museum of European Normality, which through documents such as the ‘non-visitors book’ that records the vital statistics of nameless would-be immigrants who drowned on their way to Italy, contrives to penetrate the darker areas of the European psyche.
     
The most spatially satisfying of the urban venues was given over to the Raqs Media Collective from New Delhi, who played on the familiar post-industrial aesthetic in their transformation of a derelict aluminium factory on the outskirts of Bolzano. ‘The Rest of Now’ references the Futurist Marinetti’s infatuation with aluminium, Nabokov’s notion that the future is obsolescence in reverse, and the understanding of residue as ‘all that is left behind when value is extracted.’ Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s selection from their Enthusiasts: Archive, which deals with films made by amateur film clubs in 1960s Poland, is one of many works that chime with the strong exhibition concept. Architect Jorge Otero-Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust preserves for posterity on latex casts the dust that had accumulated on the walls of the factory since it was built under Mussolini. Taking a more personal approach, Kateřina Šeda’s presents three disconcerting works about the last years of her Grandmother’s life, including Her Mistress’s Everything, a film in which the artist enacts the old woman’s daily rituals, such as turning on the radio at mealtimes, in order to console her grieving dog. At the same time the funniest and most macabre moment in Manifesta, Teresa Margolles’s Sudor y Miedo is a damp, empty room with a label belatedly informing the visitor that the air they’re breathing has been humidified with water used to wash the bodies of unidentified corpses in a Mexican morgue.

The fourth venue Fortrezza is an isolated Habsburg fortification perched on a mountain near the Austrian border, and the only show to be curated collaboratively under the rubric ‘Scenarios’. Perhaps in awe of the dramatic setting, the curators opted for the unusual solution of creating an exhibition practically without artworks. In the name of offering visitors ‘a tangible experience of immateriality’ , the vast space is given over to audio broadcasts of ten texts commissioned from writers such as novelist Arundhati Roy and theorist Saskia Sassen, at listening stations sited within the fortress. The experiment is not an unreserved success, partly because many of the recordings can only be heard through small wooden disks on strings that have to be pulled down and held to your ear, an uncomfortable position in which to concentrate on oral renditions of metaphysical reflections.
 
The very different curatorial approaches of the three teams, combined with the physical distance between the four venues and the widely varying possibilities of the exhibition spaces, makes it tempting to think in terms of a collection of mini-Manifestinos rather than one cohesive whole. There are though a number of common elements that point towards a renewed identity for the Biennial after Cyprus. The strength of Manifesta lies partly in the prominence it gives to emerging artists and curators at the expense of the most established names on the international circuit: looking down the list of participating artists in any of the M7 shows, there is plenty of underexposed talent to be discovered. This Manifesta has also gone further than any other in allowing curators the freedom to include participants from outside the art world in their productions, provocatively blurring the boundaries between curators, artists and writers, who are referred to generically in the publicity material as ‘contributors’. Manifesta is the only itinerant biennial and continues to materialise in unexpected places, this time straddling the line between German- and Italian-speaking Alpine regions, with each new context bringing fresh perspectives. Now that it’s on its feet again, we can expect the next Manifesta to tackle the burning issues of contemporary life with renewed confidence.

Reuben Fowkes