With All Due Intent, Manifesta 5

Group exhibitionMuseumPerformanceInstallation

Sep 24

Written By Lou Calderón

View of the exhibition. Photos: Adelino Oliveira, courtesy Fundaçao EDP

Manifesta 5 + info

Bunga was part of Manifesta 5, which took place in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, at the Kubo Kutxa Kursaal, the iconic building designed by Rafael Moneo. His work, the installation titled "Kursaal Project", was a temporary cardboard structure, that explored the performativity of architecture and was dramatically dismantled through strategic cuts during the biennale's opening, leaving the original building's skin as a marker of the interior and exterior.

The curators formulated a conceptual framework on the basis of a careful investigation of Donostia-San Sebastian and its surroundings. This led them to their decision to interpret the area as a zone of contingency that lends to more complex interpretations of Europe. Thus, they have come to view the city, not only as a seaside resort dominated by tourism and the leisure industry, but as a much more stratified territory that forms a backdrop to the Basque Country where a prolonged and tumultuous movement toward autonomy is a source of pride, dissonance, and tension. One means of highlighting the visual contrasts between the different areas of the city consists in locating artists’ projects both near the idyllic seafront in the city area and in the industrial setting of the neighbouring port of Pasaia, a mere five kilometres away.

Abandoning the spectacle of the political and bypassing a recent obsession in contemporary art with global geographies, the artists in Manifesta 5 make subtle use of veiled and cryptic allusions to create the potential for polemics and transgression.The works in the exhibition illustrate how intricate and idiosyncratic structures may be used to translate reality into enigmatic forms, owing less to rhetoric than to a carefully differentiated understanding of people’s relationship to the world. This complexity and the combination of order and chaos, form and formlessness, and static and performative elements, has generated work which is resolutely dissonant and reveals many hidden layers of meaning.