Six Artists to Watch at Manifesta 15

Larry Achiampong | Casa Gomis 

Anchoring Manifesta 15’s thematic cluster ‘Balancing Conflicts’, Casa Gomis is a venerated yet ailing example of 1950s Catalan Rationalist architecture, now sandwiched between the third runway of Barcelona’s airport on one side and the encroaching Mediterranean on the other. However, Larry Achiampong’s contribution here (works from his ‘Detention’ series, 2016–24) involved stepping away from any obligations to the house or its storied heritage and instead wandering off through the garden and into a grove of pines, where the roar of aeroplanes gradually fades into the crashing of waves and twigs cracked underfoot. A series of blackboards are propped up against tree trunks. Each bears a different phrase. Achiampong enlisted ten locals in positions of privilege – including, I later learn, Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art – to choose from a collection of politically charged slogans he has been gleaning and adapting from the digital public sphere since the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. These participants had repeatedly written the words out in chalk in the manner of the old-school punishment of writing lines. In doing so, pointed phrases such as ‘the colonial plan never died, it just evolved’ or ‘saved only if you’re the right shade of migrant’ parlayed insistent, memeified antiracist critique with a visual gag about disciplinary penance, in a mischievous allusion to The Simpsons’s long-running chalkboard skit. – Max Andrews, contributing writer

Asad Raza | The Three Chimneys

Presented on the top floor of Manifesta 15’s main venue, the Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys) – a decommissioned power station affectionately known by locals as the ‘Sagrada Familia of the workers’ – is Raza’s site-specific commission, Prehension (2024). Ahead of the biennial, the technocratic city council only permitted public access to Tres Xemeneies if all the frosted glass panes were removed. This inspired Raza to create an installation centred around the wind. It’s hard to miss: 22 industrial lengths of white linen cascade from the ceiling, their billowing forms visible from outside the building, just a few metres from the coastline.

Much can be interpreted from Prehension – the wall text obliquely references Édouard Glissant’s concept of tremblement (trembling thinking), while the white curtains evoke the imagery of Muslim burial shrouds. The wind, blowing in across the Balearic Sea from Africa, may also symbolize nature’s unhindered movement when put in contrast to restrictions imposed on people. However, the true power of Raza’s work lies in letting the elements speak for themselves. In his 2022 exhibition Diversion at Frankfurt’s Portikus, Raza redirected the River Main through the lower gallery floor. The artwork wasn’t the infrastructure or the concept behind it – it was the water itself. Similarly, for Manifesta, the art isn’t the linen – which will pull, stain and tear over the next 12 weeks – but the wind. It moves, it dances and that, in itself, is enough. – Angel Lambo, associate editor 

Binta Diaw | Can Trinxet 

In a former textile factory in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a finely woven maze of black synthetic braiding hair criss-crosses the renovated exhibition space of Can Trinxet, like a spider’s web designed to ensnare curious visitors. Binta Diaw’s Dïà s p o r a (2021–24), first exhibited at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury’s project space in Abidjan, is the result of an invitation to nimble-fingered women of African heritage living locally to use their braiding skills to create the intricate lattice sculpture. For two weeks, the women gathered in the space not only to weave, but also to share stories of their lives and cultures, fostering a sense of solidarity. It is this aspect of the project – the undocumented and unseen – that most powerfully evokes the often unrecognized work of women. Instead, visitors are left to interact with the products of their labour, ducking and weaving beneath thick strands and knotted nodes, until the network descends too low to pass under, forcing an awkward retreat. 

At this point, knee-high rice plants, sprouting from mounds of soil, begin to populate the floor – signalling Diaw’s second thematic focus: the transatlantic slave trade. When women were forcibly taken from West Africa to plantations across the Americas and the Caribbean, they would discreetly hide seeds, grains and rice in their hair, ready to plant in new lands. These quiet acts of resistance were common but none were as elaborate as the braiding of escape routes into their hair, of which the artist’s lattice-like construction also pays homage. While watching visitors bend and weave through the installation, their movements tinged with a childlike sense of playfulness, the mind cannot help but conjure the haunting counter-image of enslaved people making similar poses in their attempts to escape their fate. – Angel Lambo, associate editor

Claudia Pagès | The Former Gustavo Gili Publishing House

Presented in the former caretaker’s house in the courtyard of the former Gustavo Gili publishing house, Claudia Pagès’ brilliant Aljubs i Grups (Cisterns and Groups) (2024) was one of ten projects that resulted from a Manifesta open call for proposals addressed to local artists last year. It was filmed in and around two brick water deposits in the Valencian town of Xàtiva whose walls are etched with a palimpsest of ancient and modern graffiti. Part music video, part documentation of dance sequences and seemingly an appendix to her recently published novel Més de dues aigües (More than two waters) (2024), it rapped, swam, danced and speculated around the fixed status of the written word versus the fluidity of desire and spoken dialogue. It overflows with ideas; scratchy handwritten captions and diagrams superimposed on its fish-eye footage ingeniously translate its densely meandering lyrics. Pagès and her four performer colleagues immersed themselves in one of the cisterns, discovering centuries-old name tags and a plethora of phallic marks. They encountered ‘a landscape of dates’ in its dry counterpart, after speculating on the violence of contractual law, ambiguities of falling out with a friend, erasure of Spain’s Islamic history and all the undercurrents in between. – Max Andrews, contributing writer

Diana Policarpo | Monastery of Sant Cugat 

Originally presented at Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 2022, Diana Policarpo’s Liquid Transfer (2022–24) at the Monastery of Sant Cugat is a wonderfully dizzying reflection on the cultures of medicine and hysteria told through a three-screen video with a deadpan voiceover. It revolves around ergot, a fungal parasite which mimics the grain of the rye plant and causes hallucinations and convulsions when consumed in the form of bread. To coin a truism: a sack of crumbs is not the same as a loaf. Policarpo constructed an essay of micro-historical details, speculative morsels and alternative facts that drew on the story of a famed mass ergot poisoning outbreak which occurred in 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, Albert Hofmann’s accidental synthesis of LSD and secret military research into nonlethal bioweapons, all while alluding to notions of unintended consequences and deliberate conspiracy which are kept out of the frame. Appropriately, the visuals – often tinted like radiant stained-glass windows – included a cavalcade of closely-cropped, trippy hellscapes from Northern Renaissance paintings, zoomed-in botanical illustrations and cereal photomicrographs. – Max Andrews, contributing writer 

Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien | Monastery of Sant Cugat 

The Monastery of Sant Cugat serves as the centre of Manifesta 15’s ‘Cure and Care’ hub, one of the three key themes explored at the biennial, alongside ‘Imagining Futures’ and ‘Balancing Conflicts’. Many of the artists invited to respond to this theme presented works that tangentially ranged from the speculative (Monika Rikić, Somoure, 2024) to the decorative (Bea Bonafini, Restos de Sueño, 2024). Only Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien’s water-based mixed-media installation, commissioned for Manifesta 15, captures both the reverence of the monastery, which dates back to the 9th century, and the sanctity of purification ceremonies.

Upon stepping into Manlanbien’s Temple du soin (Temple of Care, 2024) there’s an immediate sense of being in the cloister of a divine maternal deity. Three large, midnight-blue carpet tapestries hang from two corners and the centre of the stone room, each depicting a fertile female form interwoven with fine, intersecting lines that evoke images of bronchial tubes, energy channels or tree roots. A wave of white salt crystals are spread across the floor, cushioning clear glass fountains small enough to be cradled in two palms, each adorned with white, masked heads gently spewing water. Nearby, clay bowls hold dried herbs, like lavender and other plants, as if prepared for use in a healing poultice. The allure of Manlanbien’s Temple du soin lies not only in its immaculate presentation, but in the way it feels as though the artist has carefully appropriated an ancient culture’s thousand-year-old cosmogony, – Angel Lambo, associate editor 

Manifesta 15 is on view at various venues in the Barcelona metropolitan area until 24 November 2024

_{Main image: Asad Raza, Prehension (detail), 2024, installation view. Courtesy: © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana and the artist; photograph: Ivan Erofeev}