An Examination of Conscience: Manifesta 16 Ruhr

Festiwal_Soul_Zouk_4_fot.Anastazja_Kanarska.jpg, default, 'Monuments from the Miners' by Pınar Öğrenci, 2026, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, photo: Rainer Schlautmann

#photography & visual arts

The paths of the Church and mainstream art diverged centuries ago, but at Manifesta 16, art returns to sacred spaces and proves that it is still capable of having a surprisingly powerful impact within them.

I’ve always preferred viewing art in churches rather than in museums. When a painting or sculpture is torn away from its architectural and theological context, it inevitably loses something. Sometimes the pieces even become downright awkward – when a work, designed to be viewed on an altar several metres above the viewers’ heads, is brought down to ground level, the perspective adjustments so brilliantly calculated by the artist simply turn into disproportionately long legs and swollen skulls. Distance and half-light serve art, and even if, under such conditions, engaging with it requires more effort, it offers, in return, greater satisfaction than viewing it in sterile conditions, as if on a dissection table.

The vision for this year’s edition of the nomadic Manifesta biennial, entitled This Is Not a Church’, was therefore particularly enticing. Taking place within a dozen or so deconsecrated, disused or largely disused churches in the Ruhr region, here, art, in a sense, returned to the home it left long ago.

Of course, there is such a thing as contemporary sacred art. However, it is a niche art form and, as a rule, it’s rather clumsy. Since Christian theology served as the unquestioned framework for social life for many centuries, the grime of everyday life, the mundane, or even the obscene could boldly intrude upon the art within church interiors. The figures on Romanesque capitals brazenly flaunt their genitals at the viewer – and no one takes offence. It is, however, futile to look for such motifs in new churches. Meanwhile, art that attempts to appeal exclusively to the loftiest sentiments and the noblest traditions inevitably descends into self-parody. The more spiritual it is, the more it resembles the trolling of a die-hard atheist.

Post-war traumas & denials

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'Sonne, Mond und Sterne' by Julian Irlinger, 2026, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, photo: Ivan Erofeev

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However, during this year’s Manifesta, the art entering these spaces abandoned by the faithful have nothing to do with devotional propriety. Rather, it serves as a reminder that – in keeping with the event’s slogan – these appropriated spaces are now merely phantom churches, and transcendence is not the issue here. Indeed, perhaps in the case of these churches, scattered across Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum, and built or rebuilt after 1945, it was never about transcendence at all, but about erasing a sense of collective guilt in a society – as Sebald put it – ‘morally discredited to the core’.

This is the thesis put forward by British artist Elizabeth Price in two video works analysing the modernist architecture of the post-war church-building boom. The artist draws on both Sebald (who criticises post-war German literature for its silence on the Allied bombings) and Anthony Vidler’s essay Air War and Architecture, which refers to Sebald’s book. Did the proliferation of churches – built so densely in the Ruhr region after the war that every resident could reach one within a few minutes – really serve to cover up wartime guilt? The figures would seem to support this. Among the existing churches in North Rhine-Westphalia, the number built after 1945 almost equals that of the entire previous millennium. Some of them are buildings reconstructed in historical styles, but the majority are modernist, open-plan halls, whose very form evoke democratic openness, social solidarity and a sense of community, sweeping the Nazi ruins under the carpet.

Price’s films, screened at the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen in Duisburg, are complemented by a modest installation by Julian Irlinger, situated in the former chancel. In it, the German artist uses paper lanterns, the sort that children carry through the streets in Germany on St Martin’s Day. Irlinger shapes his lanterns to resemble the modernist pavilions from the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. This is no coincidence – it was then that a modernist altar was unveiled in the Vatican pavilion, which later found its way to the church in Duisburg. This visually discreet intervention does not compete with the existing space, but reinforces Price and Vidler’s arguments regarding the intertwining of modern architecture with wartime trauma and the attempt to soothe consciences.

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'Ouranophobia 47051' by Abbas Zahedi, 2026, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, photo: Ivan Erofeev

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The present, however, encroaches into this otherwise orderly space. Where confessionals once stood, Emil Walde installed screens from the local railway station, acquired two years ago during its renovation, illustrating the deplorable state of the city’s infrastructure. Athina Koumparouli, meanwhile, has constructed a distinctive, austere stained-glass window from shards of glass sourced from both public and private buildings. In a side aisle of the church, shrouded in darkness, a work bearing the melancholic title All the views I can’t remember offers a subtle challenge to the monumental, modernist stained-glass window designed by Georg Meistermann.

Koumparouli’s work is both contemporary and archaic. As a stained-glass window within a church setting, it ceases to be merely a sculptural ready-made, evoking the tradition of architectural spolia dating back to antiquity. After all, the buildings of early Christianity emerged from the architecture of a declining Rome. It was not only the forms of the basilicas that alluded to the architecture of the empire; the materials from which they were constructed also came from ancient, pagan buildings. Known in art history as spolia – meaning spoils or plunder – they were also referred to by the more theologically charged term rediviva saxa, or ‘resurrected stones’.

Within the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen, organ pipes collected by Abbas Zahedi from damaged and abandoned church instruments across Europe play a similar role. The foundation of the spectacular installation Ouranophobia 47051, which fills the vast nave of the church, consists of fragments of historic organs from St Nicholas’ Church in Kyiv, destroyed by fire in September 2021. Connected by transparent tubes winding across the floor, they occasionally strike up a melancholic melody which, played on the battered pipes, sounds more like the songs of humpback whales echoing from the depths than church music.

Curated by Michael Kurtz and Henry Meyric Hughes, the exhibition in Duisburg is arguably the most brilliant part of this year’s Manifesta, delving into the causes of the post-war boom in church architecture. It skilfully plays on the tensions between the masking of fears through architectural form and the persistent return of the repressed, whilst sensitively drawing on existing elements of the vocabulary of sacred architecture and ritual. Some of the exhibitions, however, employ entirely different means.

Immigrants in the Church

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'Abendmahl / The Lord's Supper' by Akbar Behkalam, 1978, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, photo: Ivan Erofeev

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Scattered across the vast archipelago of cities in the Ruhr region, this year’s biennial is all the more distinctive in that different curators (referred to, for some reason, by the corporate-sounding term ‘creative mediators’) are responsible for the individual exhibitions. Thanks to the fact that Manifesta takes place in such diverse venues – ranging from reconstructed neo-Gothic basilicas, through modest hall churches, to strikingly sculpted structures of brick and reinforced concrete – the division into autonomous exhibitions becomes even more pronounced, and a visit to each successive church is like opening a surprise egg.

One of the key themes of Manifesta 16 is the situation of immigrant communities, the so-called ‘gastarbeiter’, including those from Türkiye and Eastern Europe. The post-war boom in religious architecture is also linked to the situation of migrant communities – in this context, the places of worship they built became a way of asserting their sense of belonging in a place in which workers from other countries could never quite feel at home.

Gürsoy Dogtaş, who is responsible, amongst other things, for the exhibition at St Boniface’s Church in Gelsenkirchen, makes skilful use of this. In front of the building’s entrance is a makeshift tea garden named after Ferdane Satır, a migrant who arrived in Duisburg from Turkey in 1976. A few years later, she and her four children were killed in their own home, which was set alight in an act of racist hatred. The interior of the church, in turn, is filled with works that are mostly classical in form (primarily figurative paintings), hung on metal lattice walls dividing the space. One is an archetypal portrait of a ‘Gastarbeiter’ painted by Yıldırım Denizli in 1984, depicting not so much a specific individual as the personification of an entire generation of Turkish migrants. The worker stands in an almost empty, gloomy room, whose walls are covered with grey wallpaper featuring a pattern reminiscent of garden netting or the bars of a cage. On one of the walls hang several significant artefacts: photographs and instruments brought from home, providing a (illusory?) sense of rootedness.

In this context, the entire architecture of the presentation becomes a brilliant play on the concept of ‘site-specific’ – a radical incongruity with the architecture turns out to be an eloquent means of communication.

The young artist Merve Kaplan adds the finishing touch with her installation Yoldaş (Turkish for ‘companion’), which is integrated into the space of the chancel, transforming this central point of the church into a liminal space resembling a modest, temporary dwelling.

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'Yoldaş' by Merve Kaplan, 2025, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, photo: Ivan Erofeev

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However, such moving moments at this year’s Manifesta are occasionally interspersed with works that are painfully banal. In every other church, one of the artists had the idea of transforming the existing pews – seen as a hierarchical structure that enforces passivity – into something non-hierarchical and engaging. The result is grandstands or even observation towers. Don’t ask how this is supposed to make them any less oppressive. It is not only contemporary sacred art that can be caricaturally banal – critical interventions in church conventions sometimes valiantly keep pace with it.

A tale about the existence of evil

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'When Animals Fall From the Sky' by Eva Koťátková (and children from Bochum and Prague), 2026, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, photo: Ivan Erofeev

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Alongside art that engages in a more or less successful dialogue with existing forms, and that which relates closely to a cross-section of society, there are also works less clearly linked to their spatial context, yet which harmonise perfectly with the setting of the abandoned churches and, much like the works of medieval and modern artists, come into their own precisely within this framework.

At the exhibition at Christ-König Church in Bochum, curated by Anda Rottenberg – one of the initiators of Manifesta – in collaboration with Krzysztof Kościuczuk, the space of the nave and chancel is filled with sculptures by Eva Koťátková and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. Once again, the Czech artist does what she does best – using, in essence, simple means, she creates a narrative so immersive that, after being engrossed in it for barely a dozen or so minutes, it takes us hours to return to reality.

Polish Presence at Manifesta 16 Ruhr 2026 – Image Gallery

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The light streaming in through the Rosette window and the narrow side windows illuminates the soft bodies of birds, moths and pink worms – all sewn from various fabrics – lying on the floor. At first glance, they appear lifeless, evoking associations with scenes from the biblical plagues of Egypt or the mysterious phenomena heralding the end of days from the Book of Revelation. After a moment, however, we realise that at least some of them are asleep, with their heads on pillows and seeds in bowls within beak’s reach, and we become immersed in the story accompanying the installation, told by two children, reminiscent of a dark fairy tale (after all, we are in the homeland of the Brothers Grimm) about people who first learnt everything that other animals can do from them, only to later oppress them more and more.

A few steps above the space around the altar, menacing totemic bears and Jangare – anthropomorphic figures moulded from wax and charcoal by Małgorzata Mirga-Tas – stand guard. On the altar table rest figures cast in pink wax from the destroyed wooden Monument to the Memory of the Roma Holocaust in Borzęcin, which, in this context, take on additional, Eucharistic connotations.

The artists do not refer directly to sacred codes, yet both draw upon what, following Polish literary historian Ryszard Koziołek and his latest collection of essays, might be termed ‘theological imagination’, circling around the same questions as theology – concerning meaning, suffering and the existence of evil.

Churches as galleries

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A piece by Mirosław Bałka at Manifesta 16 Ruhr, 21 June 2026, photo: Kuba Celej / IAM

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For several editions now, Manifesta has been preceded by research into the socio-urban context of the place it will take place. The organisers of this year’s edition view the event as a testing ground in light of the challenge that depopulating churches will soon pose for other European cities and countries. According to data collected several years ago by the German Lutheran Church, only 5% of Protestants in the country attend church services regularly. Whilst this figure is twice as high among Catholics, it still amounts to a meagre 10%. This is due not only to increasing secularisation, but also to economic factors: the descendants of former members of local parishes, which flourished so rapidly here in the post-war years, have often simply left the region in search of a livelihood – in some districts of the region, poverty rates are twice the German national average, and unemployment can reach up to 40%.

In Germany, given the almost absurd scale of post-war church construction, as well as the rapid secularisation taking place today, the problem of finding new uses for abandoned churches is particularly acute, although other countries have, of course, been grappling with this issue for several decades now. Among these new uses, exhibition spaces are among the most popular. We have such examples in Poland as well: the EL Gallery in Elbląg and the St John’s Centre in Gdańsk are both housed in former churches.

Manifesta 16 Ruhr 2026 – Image Gallery

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In the face of gentrification and rampant property development, churches (alongside libraries) remain among the few places in modern cities that can be used at will without spending a penny – for example, as was the case during the opening days of Manifesta, by seeking refuge from the heat within them. This non-commercial aspect cannot be overestimated. As the biennial’s organisers point out, during research carried out prior to the event, residents of the Ruhr Valley indicated that they needed such widely accessible, non-commercial spaces where people can gather, get to know one another and strengthen their bonds.

The choice of (almost) abandoned church spaces as the setting for Manifesta is all the more significant given that, today, art seems to occupy a position not all that distant from the Church. The visual arts have long since left their heyday – that is, their time as the leading means of narrating the world – behind them, and the institutional and market-driven system that sustains them seems as essential for survival as it is, at every level, flawed and tainted by scandals of various kinds.

Paradoxically, however, it is precisely in times of decline that hope can be found. In The Afternoon of Christianity, Tomáš Halík remains surprisingly optimistic about the future of his faith. In the twilight of universal christianitas, he sees an opportunity for the Church to develop a deeper theological maturity rather than a threat. So perhaps art, too, is not doomed solely to the role of objects of financial speculation painted in oil on canvas? If any events offer hope in this regard, it is precisely nomadic biennials such as Manifesta, free from the constraints of the market.

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