Lilli Lake – Manifesta 16 Ruhr – Manifesta 16 Ruhr

Rhythm looks for two, Lilli Lake

Sound installation, secondhand copper sourced from the Ruhr Area, paper, wood, varnish, brass

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Rhythm looks for two, 2026 © Lilli Lake. Photo © Manifesta 16 Ruhr / Rainer Schlautmann

Markuskirche’s ceiling creaks in the changing weather, reminding Lilli Lake of a boat straining under the pressure of a wave. Keen to highlight these evocative noises, she mapped the loudest points and marked them with pieces of copper, in a reference to the sheet metal used to protect hulls. Lake then positioned microphones on the ceiling to amplify the creaking: an unpredictable percussion that comes to signify the church’s transitional state. In her words, the building is “an architecture in motion, an unstable body that expands and contracts, remembers and forgets.” It “no longer speaks through sermon and ritual but the shifting of its surfaces in contact with the atmosphere beyond.” The noises are accompanied by voices describing coincidences Lake has noticed while moving between towns and countries. With these observations, she expands her search for hidden patterns in the ceiling’s sounds, connecting Markuskirche to a larger web of strange echoes.

About Lilli Lake

Working across sculpture, sound, text, and moving image, Lilli Lake unsettles habitual structures, allowing multiple perspectives including the importance of pauses in relation to noise. Within her practice, found objects and architectural elements are reconfigured and transformed through the use of poetry and displacement.

https://lillilake.com/
https://manifesta16.org/participants/lilli-lake

Emil Walde – Passing By– Manifesta 16 Ruhr – Manifesta 16 Ruhr

Passing By
Found window panels, lighting
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Passing By, 2026 © Emil Walde. Photo © Manifesta 16 Ruhr / Ivan Erofeev

This installation is made of old window panels from Duisburg main station. The train station was built in the 1930s and expanded after World War Two, but by the 2010s had fallen into disrepair. For some residents, its battered windows, visible from the platforms, became a symbol of the city’s neglected public infrastructure. Walde salvaged the panels when the building was renovated in 2024 and has since reconfigured them several times, pursuing his interest in the sculptural potential of discarded industrial and urban material. In Kulturkirche Liebfrauen the chunky steel frames and frosted panes, covered in tape and graffiti, are in dialogue with the building’s more delicate but sometimes also dilapidated elements – its fibreglass sides and stained-glass windows. The niches in the wall where Walde’s installation stands originally housed confession boxes. In their absence, the work creates intimate corners for rest and reflection, like a platform waiting room or an abandoned confessional.

About Emil Walde

Emil Walde’s work is based primarily on the observation and examination of site-specific contexts and brings together materials and situations. By integrating existing materials and their properties into his practice, he sharpens the viewer’s awareness of their surroundings. His work thus opens up the possibility of questioning assumptions and unleashing new intellectual potential. Through this approach, Walde’s work poses fundamental questions about cultural and social space in architecture and sculpture.

AYŞE ERKMEN – Confessional

Ayşe Erkmen’s Confessional reimagines a familiar element of church architecture: the confession booth. Traditionally, this was a protected and trusted place to share thoughts, doubts or regrets in private. In Erkmen’s work, this idea is translated into the present. The booth becomes a simple, enclosed structure that contains a digital interface. Instead of speaking to a priest, visitors encounter a system that can respond to questions or concerns, echoing how many forms of communication have shifted towards personal devices and online systems. The work connects past and present ways of seeking answers: one rooted in shared ritual, the other in individual, technology-based interaction. While both suggest privacy, they differ in how meaning and trust are formed. Confessional raises questions about where we look for guidance today, how we share what matters to us and how these exchanges are shaped by the systems we rely on.

Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth.

Source: AYŞE ERKMEN – Confessional

Yes or No and Vice Versa – Galeria Miejska Arsenał w Poznaniu

Blue Objects without Specific Function, 2024–2025 © Jarosław Kozłowski. Photo © Manifesta 16 Ruhr / Rainer Schlautmann

This series of eleven drawings unfolds along the central axis of the church, leading from the entrance of the nave towards the altar. Installed in a single line, the works guide the movement of visitors through the space. Each drawing shows simple blue forms arranged on a neutral background. The shapes vary in number and size, creating subtle shifts from one image to the next. There is no narrative or symbolic meaning attached to them. As Kozłowski writes, “they are not metaphors; they do not serve any function that pretends they are something else, nor do they suggest any more or less sophisticated content connected with the present or with art history.” At the end of the sequence, the text “AND SO ON…” appears on the wall. It suggests continuation without defining what follows. The work invites a slow and attentive way of looking, where meaning is not fixed but can emerge through the act of seeing.

Courtesy of the artist.
With the kind support of Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

About Jarosław Kozłowski

Jarosław Kozłowski is conceptual artist whose practice is grounded in a constant questioning of the rules of language, art, and reality. He treats creative work as a field of play, in which subsequent works remain in dialogue, often contradicting each other. His works examine the conventional meaning and the relationships between language, image and experience. Kozłowski works with ambiguity, leaving the viewer space for interpretation and participation. He combines analytical reflection with irony and humour, to demystify artistic and social conventions. He treats art as an autonomous and critical space, maintaining a distance from ideology and institutions.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

 

Jarosław Kozłowski’s new exhibition – Yes or No and Vice Versa – provides a continuation of his long-running, subversive play with the very concept of art. As early as in the 1970s, in his Art as Art manifesto, Kozłowski put forth fundamental questions about what art is and what it is not. In his view, art

Source: Yes or No and Vice Versa – Galeria Miejska Arsenał w Poznaniu

Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness | MoMA

Exhibition. Jul 27–Nov 2, 2014. *Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness*—the first retrospective ever mounted of Christopher Williams (American, b. 1956)—spans the impressive 35-year career of one of the most influential cinephilic artists working in photography. Williams studied at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid to late 1970s under the first wave of West Coast Conceptual artists, including John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher, only to become his generation’s leading Conceptualist and art professor; he is currently professor of photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Deeply invested in the histories of photography and film, architecture and design, Williams has produced a concise oeuvre that furthers a critique of late capitalist society in which images typically function as agents of spectacle. For the title of this exhibition, Williams has taken a line from a documentary by French director Jean-Luc Godard, in which an amateur filmmaker compares his daily job as a factory worker with his hobby of editing his films of the Swiss countryside as “the production line of happiness.” In Williams’s hands the phrase appears to refer broadly to the function of much photography in today’s consumer culture, in which it not only pictures but also produces so many experiences and objects to be consumed. The Production Line of Happiness features Williams’s little-seen Super-8 shorts, major projects from the 1980s to the early 1990s, and photographs from his subsequent magnum series For Example: Die Welt ist schön (The world is beautiful) (1993–2001) and For Example: Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle (Eighteen lessons on industrial society) (2003–today). Though the exhibition concentrates on photography, other salient aspects of Williams’s practice, such as extensive vinyl “supergraphics” and interventions with display architecture, are also represented. As part of MoMA’s Carte Blanche screening series, Williams will organize a two-week experimental film program running July 23–29 and September 15–21, 2014, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. After its presentation at MoMA, the exhibition travels to Whitechapel Gallery, London, where it will be organized by Mark Godfrey, Curator of International Art, Tate Modern. At The Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition was organized by Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Department of Photography, AIC. The exhibition is accompanied by an illuminating and unusual volume, in equal parts artist’s book and exhibition catalogue, which includes a trio of essays by curators Mark Godfrey, Roxana Marcoci, and Matthew S. Witkovsky that reflect on Williams’s engagement with his artistic peers and predecessors, with cinema (particularly the film-essay), and with modes of display and publicity in the art world. These contributions are “interrupted” by a transcript of a talk Williams delivered on the work of John Chamberlain, and by historical and contemporary textual and visual materials that were selected by the artist himself.

Source: Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness | MoMA

Thomas Struth: Figure Ground | Haus der Kunst Munich

Welcome to Haus der Kunst: a global centre for contemporary arts in Munich.

Source: Thomas Struth: Figure Ground | Haus der Kunst Munich

 

This exhibition of the renowned German photographer Thomas Struth (b. 1954), presents a comprehensive survey of his genre-defining oeuvre. Covering four decades of work and every phase of his career, the exhibition focuses on Struth’s social interests, which represent the important forces of his influential artistic development. Comprised of more than 130 works, this exhibition is the largest survey of his artistic career to date. It brings together never-before-shown early works and collected research material drawn from his archive; these, elucidate the far-reaching and long-standing ideas behind the works and demonstrate the process of his artistic translation up to the perfection of the image.