PRISTINA.- For an international art-world gathering, the visitors at Manifesta were younger than what you would expect. Last Thursday, at the Grand Hotel here, dozens of teenage girls roamed the corridors, posing in front of installations and snapping selfie after selfie next to paintings and video works.

Enesa Havoli, 19, said she had “never been to exhibitions before,” and had decided to give Manifesta a try. “It’s so beautiful,” she added, just yards from an installation by Dutch artist Mette Sterre that featured a grotesque rubber sea monster.

The 14th edition of Manifesta, a roving 100-day event staged every two years in a different European city, opened in July and runs until Sunday. The Pristina edition, spread out across 25 venues, had “become a whole trend” among schoolchildren in Kosovo, said Eliosa Jerliu, 15, who was visiting the show with three friends. Since Dua Lipa, the British-Kosovan pop star, had stopped by the exhibition in August and posted about it on Instagram, “everyone wants to come here,” she added. Jerliu and her friends then headed into a room that Kosovan artist Laureta Hajrullahu had covered with cotton fluff so that it looked like a cloud. Immediately, the young women struck poses and began taking selfies.

For a country as young as Kosovo, which achieved independence in 2008, the arrival of Manifesta this summer was a coup, bringing hundreds of curators, dealers and critics to Pristina and giving the city a rare moment of the international art world’s attention. The last time it had showed an interest was in the late 1990s, after a brutal war in which ethnic Albanian rebels fought against Serbian forces that had controlled Kosovo since Yugoslavia’s breakup.

When the conflict ended, international curators came to Kosovo hoping to find artists they could exhibit abroad to draw attention to the country’s plight, said Jakup Ferri, an artist representing Kosovo at this year’s Venice Biennial. But their attention soon moved on to the next global trouble spot, he added.

Manifesta’s nomadic setup suits the art world’s restlessly shifting focus. Established to promote artistic dialogue between Europe’s East and West after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its first edition was staged in 1996, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In subsequent exhibitions, Manifesta has provoked conversations about social and political issues across the continent, such as migration, a major theme of the 2018 edition in Palermo, Sicily, and civil rights, a focus during the 2014 exhibition, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Manifesta’s founder, Dutch art historian Hedwig Fijen, said in an interview that, since Palermo, the biennial has also increasingly involved architects and planners to create projects that can revitalize the host cities.

For this edition, Italian architect Carlo Ratti created an “urban vision” for Pristina suggesting ways that derelict sites throughout the city could be reclaimed for public use. Several of his recommendations have been adopted, including turning an abandoned railway track into a public walkway.

Catherine Nichols, an Australian curator based in Berlin who is Manifesta 14’s artistic director, said in an interview that the biennial was using several neglected sites as exhibition spaces, including the Great Hammam, a historic public baths that was closed in the 1990s after a fire. Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has hung hundreds of red threads from the Hammam’s ceiling in a dramatic display. Such eye-catching presentations are drawing a large public: A Manifesta spokesperson said the show’s indoor venues had been visited over 151,000 times, over 30,000 more than during the biennial’s previous edition.




In a country that lacks arts infrastructure — Kosovo has only one major commercial gallery, the quirkily named LambdaLambdaLambda — Manifesta was also an opportunity to boost local artists’ careers. Around 40% of the 130 participating artists were from Kosovo, Nichols said, adding this was a higher proportion of local artists than in many other biennials. (At Manifesta 13, in Marseille, France, there were 13 French artists, or about 20% of the total.)

Most of the Kosovans taking part were painters or video artists, Nichols said, because materials to make sculpture and installations were too expensive in the country. All those artists shared “a vulnerability, and rawness and searchingness that is starting to produce really interesting art,” she added.

Dardan Zhegrova, a Kosovan artist whose work in the exhibition includes a series of colorful, human-size dolls that visitors can lie on, said that making art in Kosovo was tough because there were so few collectors to buy the works. (He hadn’t sold anything in three years, he added.) But, thanks to the show, he had met curators from institutions including MoMA PS1 in New York, he said, adding that “hundreds and hundreds of people tagged me in photos, lying with my voodoo dolls and having these intimate moments with them.”

Though several Kosovan artists were eager to praise Manifesta, some also said they were worried about what would happen once the show finished Sunday and began preparing for its next edition, in Barcelona, in 2024. Zhegrova said he was “a little paranoid” that artists in the country would be left “eating crumbs” once more with the government less likely to support artists when the international spotlight had gone.

Fijen, Manifesta’s founder, said in an interview that the biennial was trying to leave a legacy for artists in Kosovo, including through a space it had created called the Centre for Narrative Practice. The center includes a photography dark room and a workshop filled with power tools for artists to use. Pristina’s city authorities have given Manifesta the building for four years, Fijen said, and the foundation that runs the biennial is raising funds to make it a permanent institution.

Kosovo’s national government is also looking to use Manifesta as a springboard for development. Hajrulla Cekun, the country’s culture minister, said in an interview in his art-filled office that he wanted to build Kosovo’s first museum of contemporary art by 2026. (The country already has a National Gallery, with a collection of 20th-century art, yet that institution has not had a permanent director for several years and its poorly maintained collection sits piled up in its basement.) Kosovo “needs an institution that would connect us to the world art scene,” he said, adding it would help enhance the country’s international standing at a time when some countries still do not recognize Kosovo’s independence. This summer, Cekun set up a committee that includes the artists Petrit Halilaj, Sislej Xhafa and Flaka Haliti to develop a plan for that museum.

Sitting outside a Pristina bar, Haliti said the drive to create the museum showed Kosovo’s artists taking initiative themselves, rather than waiting to fall under the international spotlight again. As a child growing up in Kosovo, Haliti said, she never had the chance to visit anything like the proposed contemporary art museum. “I went to a gallery the first time in my life when I was an art student,” she said. “How crazy is that?”

Since July, Manifesta has been giving young Kosovans more opportunity to see art than Haliti ever had at their age. Last Friday night, Gresla Toplana, 21, visiting the biennial with her boyfriend, walked into a room featuring an installation made up of multicolored shopping carts and started snapping selfies. The piece was “weird” and not to her taste, she said, but she still wanted some photos with it.

Nearby, Elvira Osmanollaj, 24, a fashion student, said it was the first time Pristina had hosted a show with “so many interesting things to look at.” It was a shame Manifesta was ending, she said, but she was sure next year, “there’ll come something new, something more interesting.” She just didn’t know what.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.