The Berlin-based Australian curator also reveals nomadic biennial’s theme
Manifesta 14 has announced that the Berlin-based Australian curator Catherine Nichols will be helming the next biennial in Pristina, Kosovo, in 2022. Nichols, who is currently co-artistic director of beuys 2021, a year-long programme in Germany that celebrates the centenary of Fluxus founder Joseph Beuys, also revealed the biennial’s title and concept, ‘it matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise’. The theme, a Manifesta press release says, ‘takes up the challenge of exploring and generating new practices and modes of collective storytelling’ and hopes to focus on ‘creating, together with local and regional communities, alternative models of social-cultural, urban and artistic engagement’.
Of the concept behind the forthcoming edition, Nichols stated: ‘When I visited Pristina, the people I encountered, the conversations I had, the work I witnessed gave me a palpable sense of the transformative power that lies in stories and in the act, in the practice of storytelling itself. Here you can really feel that it’s storytelling that brings into being the public realm: the space between you and me. I am delighted at the prospect of joining the Manifesta 14 team in bringing together artists, thinkers, scientists and citizens from all over Europe and beyond to explore how storytelling might enable us to engage with one another and, in our inherent plurality, to act in concert, to bring forth a more-than-human common world.’
Manifesta 14 will be on show 22 July – 30 October 2022.
