Grey cityscapes, crowded regional train rides, thick air filled with rage after a lost football match – a teenage girl who just wants to leave, but must wait for a bus that is late, yet again. The German rust belt, or as we call it, Ruhrpott, is where I grew up, where my grandfather worked in the coal mines, and my grandmother washed the steps of the city hall, a place where my parents found a sense of belonging.
On one of the hottest days ever recorded in this region, a group from the Curatorial Studies Master program (Goethe University and Städelschule), which I joined last year in October, travelled from Frankfurt am Main to Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Duisburg to visit the 16th edition of Manifesta, a pan-European nomadic Biennial. This marks my first visit to the Ruhr region to look at some art. Maybe it does feel like coming home afterall?

Under the title 'This is not a Church,' the team behind Manifesta 16 Ruhr has set out not only to revitalize the Catholic Church’s struggling image, but also to draft an entire “urban vision” for the Rust Belt of an otherwise rusting Germany. Under the premise of studying urban transformation processes, the architect Josep Bohigas maps out his ideas for the future of around 20,000 churches that are about to be deconsecrated in the next ten years—visualized by AI images generated by ChatGPT. In the said urban vision booklet, we encounter churches that look like botanical gardens with no source of light, atmospheric swimming pools under a burning sun and recycling centers where racialized people work happily next to each other. The image From altar to shelter is particularly haunting in the otherwise “leisure and pleasure”-esque scenery. While the proposed urban vision recognizes the function of the post-war churches, which were built in great numbers after the immense destruction of World War II in order to restore faith in humanity and morals, it is ultimately failing to address the political climate in Germany today. Namely, the rise of the AfD (a right-wing party) that also arrived in the Ruhr region, an area that was once described as the “heart of social democracy.” Just recently, the AfD deputy mayor Norbert Emmerich was voted out of office following the release of a racist video in which Roma and Sinti were forced to clean the streets of Gelsenkirchen.

The reality we encounter is different from the utopian images generated by AI. Copper thefts have stripped St. Marien of its historic roof, and the funds for renovation have either arrived too late or not arrived at all. St. Marien is set to be demolished. Its brutalist beauty is slowly decaying. Inside, a site-specific installation titled Variations on Godspeed in 4/4 Time (2026) by William Engelen consists of 144 metal tubes, a deconstructed organ that can be played by willing visitors. The at times off-key melodies fill the damp air with nostalgia. Mira M. Yang’s installation Karaoke Falsetto (2026) inhabits a dark, smaller room. The costumes of the two singers, So Sol-i and Choi Seung Ho, are placed in a dimly lit niche. The costumes are inspired by Klaus Nomi, an artist from Essen who was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s and became famous for blending opera singing with New Wave (but also for baking cake), as well as by Nina Hagen, who easily bridged opera and punk. Next to them is a screen showing the actual performance, which was part of the live programming of Manifesta. Filmed at St. Marien and Freakshow, a punk bar in Essen-Steele, the work inhabits two spaces that appear contrary to each other. While Falsetto is a singing technique where one tightens one’s vocal cords until a high-pitched tone is released, translated from Italian as a little false, Karaoke is a non-professional singing of popular songs. Both in Engelen's and Yang's work professional and amateur practices blend, which reminds me of the church as one of the few places where people come together to sing, whether they sing well or not.

When leaving St. Marien, the question of what remains stays with me. What is left after the so-called “15 weeks of culture in your neighbourhood?” Even by announcing 'This is not a Church,' the post-war liturgical architecture remains. And entering a church is not only a spiritual experience but also a political one, to an extent. Symbolically speaking, the church is one of the few non-commercial places, a place of spiritual encounter, that is supposedly open to everyone. Filled with liturgical art that used to tell stories with moral meaning to a previously mostly illiterate community, it was a place of gathering, and art has always been a part of it.

By entering St. Bonifatius - Ferdane Satır Tea Garden, a deconsecrated Catholic church in Gelsenkirchen, I find myself in a deconstructed setting of my grandparents’ home. Only that here, the carpet is amber-coloured instead of the half a decade old mint green I knew from my childhood. Merve Kaplan’s installation Yoldaş (2025) depicts the illusion of working-class prosperity, an empty Turkish Çay cup left on the altar, framed by three brown tiles with flower motifs. Remnants of furniture in the style of “Gelsenkirchener Barock” (and I hear my mom’s mocking voice inside my head) are erected like pillars. Three pairs of slippers left behind on the carpet invite you to slide inside and rest, only that a sofa with its spiky fabric that gives you a rash is missing. Displayed around the altar, which thus becomes the centerpiece, a sense of friction remains between intentionality and form.

Where Bohigas fails to mention the term Gastarbeiter:innen (engl. guest worker), and dismisses its historical significance for the Ruhr region, one of the creative mediators, Gürsoy Doğtaş, makes it the starting point of his curation. By renaming the churches, Doğtaş draws on individuals who are of meaning for local communities. The word “guest” implies a temporary stay and disregards the structural significance of the working-class. The aftermath of these post-war politics is still traceable as in the AfD campaign described earlier or in the racially motivated arson attack where Ferdane Satır was killed in Duisburg in 1984. 
The artworks on display at St. Bonifatius - Ferdane Satır Tea Garden are mainly by Turkish and Kurdish immigrants who moved to the Ruhr region for work. Among them is the work by Yıldız Tüzün, Untitled (1993), consisting of used and archived coffee filters. Held inside a steel drawer that has been manufactured to match their shape, the coffee filters are stored like precious envelopes containing secret notes not meant for prying eyes. Both Kaplan and Tüzün address the private sphere, a place that is usually restricted to unwelcome guests.

In Duisburg’s Liebfrauen Kulturkirche, Athina Koumparouli’s work Dead Natures / Living Evidence (2026) touches on heavy industry and how it changed the landscape of the region. The installation is positioned on a tiny patch of land between the church and the magistrate's court next door. It is protected only by a hanging construction fence, and its symbolic exclusion is ever present in this country. Copper-plated leaves and branches peek out between aerated concrete blocks, like plants finding their way to grow between otherwise sealed concrete paths. In All the views I can’t remember (2026), Koumparouli reconstructed a window from fragments of glass one cannot see through. A similar non-view as in my grandparents’ house, where one cannot look beyond the crocheted curtains. In both spaces, time stands still.

As I am writing this, my grandfather stares at me. I am working, I tell him and return my gaze to the screen. He seems bewildered. Working, for him, is “Malochen”, slang for hard, physical labour. It also involves getting drunk at 5 a.m. on homemade schnapps with his colleagues. 

And so I’m sitting here, left with the sense of a disconnection between my grandparents’ experiences in post-war Germany and this question of which lasting impact these large-scale art biennials actually have. When art becomes a spectacle and churches are commercialized, perhaps the urban vision didn't need visualization at all, but rather a clear vision for the art world. The symbolic approach to urban planning becomes evident against the backdrop of increasingly right-wing politics, which generally aims to undermine social structures and progressive art practices. However, the Ruhr region has never lacked a sense of community, whether it’s a bottle of schnapps or art that forges this relationship.

MANIFESTA 16 Ruhr

Artists:

Athina Koumparouli, Merve Kaplan, Mira M. Yang, William Engelen, Yıldız Tüzün

21.06.2026 - 04.10.2026

Free Entry