“As Chair of the M11 Curatorial Selection Committee*, it gives me great pleasure to announce that German artist Christian Jankowski has been selected as the Manifesta 11 Chief Curator. For the first time in Manifesta’s history, an individual artist will take the position of Chief Curator and will work on a project for an entire urban environment. Jankowski will investigate the whole array of art’s authorship, its production and its reflection on Zurich’s professional landscape. In doing so, Manifesta 11’s Chief Curator approaches the complex identities of the city in an unexpected way, reaching out to audiences beyond the inner circle of contemporary art biennials.”
Hedwig Fijen, Manifesta Director
Christian Jankowski (Göttingen, 1968) studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (Germany) and is currently based in Berlin. In his artistic actions and media artworks, he makes use of film, video, and photography, but also painting, sculpture, and installation. Jankowski’s work consists of performative interactions between himself and non-art professionals, between contemporary art and the so-called ‘world outside of art’. During the course of his artistic career, Jankowski has collaborated with magicians, politicians, news anchors, and members of the Vatican, to name just a few. Jankowski registers these performative collaborations using the mass media formats in which he stages his work––film, photography, television, newspapers. This procedure lends his work its populist appeal. Jankowski’s work can be seen both as a reflection, deconstruction, and a critique of a society based on spectacle. In his view, art has turned into a spectacle, and as a result, has undermined its critical potential.
Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, selected the City of Zurich as Manifesta 11 Host for 2016. Zurich offered the opportunity for Manifesta to research an urban environment for the first time. Manifesta 11 in Zurich means that the complex and rapidly changing identity of the city will be the object of close curatorial examination.
Image: Christian Jankowski, Courtesy Manifesta