Catherine Nichols Appointed Creative Mediator for Manifesta Prishtina 2022

Catherine Nichols. Photo by Peter Rigaud.

Manifesta 14
Pristina, Kosovo
July 22, 2022 – October 30, 2022
https://manifesta14.org

Under the biennial title it matters what worlds world worlds: how to tell stories otherwise,* Manifesta 14 takes up the challenge of exploring and generating new practices and modes of collective storytelling. Revolving around an emergent Centre for Narrative Practice, which will be located at the Hivzi Sylejmani Library, the manifold participatory sites of multidisciplinary learning and artistic intervention aim to show that storytelling is no mere matter of historiography. Rather it is a vital strategy of political and social engagement. Together the richly layered formats envision what new worlds we might world if, in the words of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, we actively “train” our “imagination to go visiting”. In collaboration with an international and local team, Manifesta 14 will examine how crucial storytelling is to our collective survival.

“Manifesta 14 Prishtina is focused on creating, together with local and regional communities, alternative models of social-cultural, urban and artistic engagement. In addition to this, the foundation is working on developing a long-term strategy for setting up a creative interdisciplinary hub and concrete artistic interventions in public space which all can visit during our 100-day biennial programme in 2022. We selected Catherine Nichols, as an arts and literary scholar, curator and writer based in Berlin, to bring her extensive knowledge and vision regarding interdisciplinary programmes that explore alternative democratic forms and artistic transformation. Her expertise fits perfectly into the artistic practices exploring new sustainable and creative communities focusing on how we can live. work and take care of each other in an age which is in urgent need for environmental sustainability.” Hedwig Fijen, Founding Director Manifesta

For its fourteenth edition, Manifesta is taking place in the Western Balkans in Kosovo’s capital Prishtina. It is exploring how to reclaim public space for the citizens whilst seeking new ways of storytelling within the social, ecological and urban environment. Catherine Nichols, a Berlin-based curator and writer, will take the artistic lead for the next edition opening on the 22nd of July 2022. Having mounted acclaimed exhibitions across Germany, she is currently the artistic director of beuys 2021, a year-long centenary programme in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia dedicated to the artist Joseph Beuys. Drawing on her long-term experimental and interdisciplinary approach to exhibition-making, culminating in a recent laboratory exploring radical democratic forms of collectivity, she has created an interdisciplinary, inclusive and sustainable alternative for what a biennial could be. Nichols will work closely with the earlier appointed Italian architect Carlo Ratti, who today presented a new vision based on his model for participatory urbanism for the city of Prishtina.

“When I visited Prishtina, 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.” Catherine Nichols, Creative Mediator Manifesta 14 Prishtina

* Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016

About Catherine Nichols

Catherine Nichols is an arts and literary scholar, curator and writer based in Berlin. Since completing her doctorate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, in 2001 with a thesis on Hans Magnus Enzensberger, she has curated a broad range of cultural history exhibitions at institutions across Germany on topics spanning from the Reformation to the passions, from the sun to sexuality. She has also mounted over twenty monographic and thematic art exhibitions including Beuys: We are the Revolution, The End of the 20th Century: The Best Is Yet to Come and Capital: Debt – Territory – Utopia for the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin (in collaboration with Eugen Blume) and most recently Everyone is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys (in collaboration with Isabelle Malz and Eugen Blume) at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. She has published widely on contemporary art as well as editing numerous catalogues and books, such as Bruce Nauman: Ein Lesebuch, Black Mountain: An Interdisciplinary Experiment, 1933–1957 and Shine on Me: Wir und die Sonne. She is currently the artistic director of beuys 2021, a year-long centenary programme comprising some 30 cultural events in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia as well as an online radio station, a symposium and an interdisciplinary laboratory exploring radical democratic forms of collectivity.