Manifesta 4: defining Europe? Acting more as facilitators than as curatorial stars, the organizers of last summer's Manifesta created an experimental visual forum—with mixed results - Report From Frankfurt

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Susan Snodgrass

Public space as something experiential rather than purely physical was explored in several works, including two by Bulgarian artists. Kalin Serapionov's dual-channeled video installation Unrendered (2001) captured the faces and emotions of those waiting in a crowded Zurich railway station. With a slow-motion gaze, the camera panned across a sea of nameless people, focusing on expressions of worry, boredom and anticipation as they awaited their party's arrival. When travelers and loved ones were finally united, gestures of joy and intimacy heightened the work's emotional impact. Ivan Moudov's Traffic Control (2001), a recorded street performance presented in the video program, is humorously subversive. Masquerading as a Bulgarian policeman, the artist disrupts traffic in Graz, Austria, redirecting motorists and pedestrians, interfering with familiar patterns of movement. The performance ends when the Austrian police arrive to arrest him.

Both works illustrate, to some degree, theorist Michel de Certeau's notion of the city as an "immense social experience of lacking a place." (1) According to de Certeau, the city is experienced through walking and freedom of movement. This idea was taken literally by Belgium-based Christoph Fink, whose Movement #52 (2002) documents the artist's walks through several cities, including Frankfurt. Unfortunately, the textual notations of his excursions, marked on paper and displayed under a glass tabletop, lack the visual poetry of, for example, works by Richard Long.

Jonas Dahlberg, of Stockholm, provides a dark, even sinister counterpoint to Fink's private travelogues in his video projection One-Way Street (2002). The viewer is led down an empty street of a virtual city, whose anonymous architecture, rendered in a futurist geometry, appears threatening in this nighttime scene. The road, devoid of human presence except for the viewer's shadow, never ends, so that the innocent encounters of the flaneur, as suggested in Fink's work, become, here, experiences of alienation and fear.

The City and Its Matrices

The modernist city as a failed utopia is a theme that resonated in some of the exhibition's more rewarding works, in particular A Place Like Any Other (2001) by Pia Ronicke from Copenhagen. Two films, shown simultaneously on separate monitors, offer contrasting, present-day perspectives on the suburb of Bredan, a functionalist residential and park environment built near Stockholm in the late 1960s. In one film, interviews with tour guides, architects, historians and white residents are interspliced with historical footage, imparting a positive view of Bredan and the planners' original utopian vision. The second film paints a negative portrait. Discussions with members of this interracial community reveal a host of social problems: single mothers lack necessary government support; blacks, Arabs and other residents of color distrust local politicians and feel disenfranchised.

Other works succeeded in transforming social critique into real activism, as in The Average Citizen Lobbying Project (1999-2002) by Mans Wrange of Stockholm. This multi-medium installation, one of the most compelling works in Manifesta 4, celebrates Marianne, a real person embodying a statistical portrait of the average Swedish citizen. Marianne is a single female without children, has a high-school education, lives in a two-room apartment and earns an annual income of about $20,000. She was interviewed by the artist about what she believes to be society's most crucial problems and how these problems should be resolved. She says, for example: "People should be able to share views in discussion programs owned by national media as they elect who is to debate issues in parliament." And: "Shortage of time is a social problem equal to unemployment." Her opinions were churned into pithy slogans by political lobbyists and speech writers, then inserted into public discourse by politicians, journalists and other significant figures to influence public opinion with Marianne's views. Through slick media graphics, the installation traces the dissemination of each view and its actual impact on Swedish society. A portrait bust of Marianne sat at the center of the gallery, and another outside under the rotunda of the Kunsthalle.