Manifesta 10 to take place in St Petersburg?

Installation view of Richard Long, Bolivian Cole Line, 1992/2012, Manifesta 9, Ghenk, 2012. Photo Kate Sutton.

Today, Russian newspaper Izvestia reported that the 10th edition of Manifesta – the roaming European biennale, last sited in the Belgian mining town of Ghenk – will take place in St Petersburg in the summer of 2014.

So far, Manifesta has not commented on this, but the article  claims that the organizing committee has narrowed the selection to three curators and that the biennale will be spread across several platforms, including the new contemporary wing of the Hermitage, the General Staff building. (We would presume another platform may be the Iris Foundation’s New Holland, an off-shoot of the Moscow Garage, but no word on that yet, as the island complex may very well still be under renovation in 2014.) Members of the organizing committee include Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky and Hermitage 20/21’s Dmitry Ozerkov, in addition to three existing members of the Manifesta team.

The article rounds off this brief with a quote from the ever-amusing Olga Sviblova, sometime curator of the Russian Pavilion in Venice and present director and founder of the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum: “Manifesta always has and always will be in a place for the first time, it never happens twice in the same location. So there’s no reason to get all stirred up about it being in St Petersburg. We have already spent 20 years living in a normal, free country, just the same as any others.”

For the full article (in Russian), check here.

For more information on Manifesta, we recommend exploring the website.