Contained in the St. Gertrude Church in Essen, Germany, all of the church pews are on their sides, standing vertically, like towers on the chancel. The bottoms of the benches are carved with elegant graffiti phrases, like “Maintain door open”, “Love is freedom” and “How can I let go and be free?”
This set up, Elevation, was created by Berlin-based artist Nasan Tur, and it’s certainly one of a couple of dozen artworks that fill the previous Catholic church. In-built 1877, it was closely broken within the Second World Conflict and rebuilt in 1955. In June 2025, it held its final non secular service, and since then it has been reworked into a house for artist studios and an exhibition area.
It’s certainly one of 12 church buildings all through the Ruhr valley of Germany, a traditionally coal mining and metal manufacturing space, which can be the main focus of this 12 months’s Manifesta 16 Ruhr, the thirtieth anniversary version of the biennial.
Manifesta 16 questions how empty church buildings may be repurposed for the local people
© Silviu Guiman
The purpose this 12 months is to discover how the area’s many disused church buildings may be revitalised by way of varied various kinds of cultural and group tasks which may profit one of the vital deprived elements of North Rhine-Westphalia.
“When Manifesta involves a metropolis, we don’t begin with an exhibition; we include a query: What’s taking place right here?” says Hedwig Fijen, Manifesta’s director. “We all the time ask what is required, what do folks need, and what’s the most pressing socio-political difficulty? Once we arrived within the Ruhr, we came upon that it’s one of the vital poor, fragile areas.”
Within the Ruhr area, Fijen says, “Folks instructed us, we’d like frequent areas, locations the place we are able to barbecue, or simply come collectively of their free time. These empty church buildings may be these areas.”
Like earlier editions of the nomadic biennial, Manifesta 16 Ruhr, which opened to the general public on Sunday 21 June and runs by way of 4 October, establishes residency in a selected metropolis or metropolitan space, bringing curators, urbanists and artists from throughout the globe to create artwork installations and cultural programmes aimed toward transformation.
It’s in contrast to earlier editions, nevertheless, as a result of it encompasses not one however 4 cities—Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum—whereas collaborating with dozens of museums and artwork establishments within the surrounding Ruhr area. As such, it’s arduous to go to in a single day, and is best visited by automotive over a two- or three-day journey.
Within the aftermath of the Second World Conflict, Fijen explains, Germany tried to rebuild the social material of its society by constructing church buildings in each neighbourhood. Lots of them have been constructed within the Brutalist architectural type, by a few of the notable architects of the period, akin to Alvar Aalto and Gottfried Böhm.
These neighborhood church buildings have been referred to as pantoffelkirchen (slipper church buildings), referring to the concept that the church needs to be shut sufficient to house that one might stroll there of their slippers. However within the Nineteen Eighties, when the coal mines and the metal trade shut down on this area, lots of the employees who attended church moved away, and others merely stopped attending. Some have been deconsecrated, and others merely deserted.
In the present day, the area’s demographic is not simply Catholic or Protestant, however is extra religiously various with Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and different non secular minority communities, in addition to a big irreligious inhabitants.
“We went round and visited about 200 disused church buildings,” Fijen says. “I believed: Ce n’est pas un pipe, or ‘This isn’t a church,’ however what can it grow to be?”
Josep Bohigas’ set up at St. Josef, Gelsenkirchen
© Ivan Erofeev
Worldwide artists and designers that have been introduced in by Manifesta got here up with varied options. St. Josef’s in Gelsenkirchen was first used as a basketball courtroom, and later reworked by Barcelona-based architect Josep Bohigas; he inflated a large blue balloon within the nave, and coated the ground with sand to make the inside really feel like a seaside.
Installations together with a tea backyard at St. Bonifatius Gelsenkirchen
© Rainer Schlautmann
St. Bonifatius, inbuilt 1963, is renamed for the biennial in honour of Ferdane Satır, a migrant labourer who was killed in 1984, together with six members of her household, in a racist assault focusing on immigrants from Turkey and Yugoslavia. Gürsoy Doğtaş, a German curator and youngster of so-called “visitor employees,” created a tea backyard, with varied vegetation rising in an outside nursery, and tea bag manufacturing inside the previous church.
Artists Julian Irlinger, Athina Koumparouli, Elizabeth Worth, Emil Walde and Abbas Zahedi interact with the constructed setting at Kulturkirche Liebfrauen, Duisburg
© Ivan Erofeev
Within the centre of Duisburg, the landmark Kulturkirche Liebfrauen, a 1958 Brutalist masterpiece designed by Toni Hermanns, is already used as a cultural centre. For Manifesta, curators Henry Meyric Hughes and Michael Kurtz have created a sound set up utilizing the pipes from church organs that have been destroyed after the Second World Conflict.
“These church buildings could be a good instance of how folks work collectively,” says Fijen. “We gave 12 completely different fashions of how these church buildings may be reused. And now we are saying to the politicians: please after Manifesta is closed, please hold asking these questions and resolve what must be performed.”
Manifesta 16 Ruhr, a number of venues throughout the Ruhr space, Germany, 21 June-4 October 2026
