After Sonsbeek 20→24, curated by Bonaventure Ndikung, came to a premature end, the Municipality of Arnhem quickly took the initiative to appoint a new director and establish a new Supervisory Board. The newly appointed director is Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg, who, after studying theater at Utrecht University and attending the Utrecht School of the Arts, enrolled in the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam. Together with a yet-to-be-formed team, she will be responsible for the next Sonsbeek exhibition, which is set to take place in 2026 and is expected to last around a hundred days, from July to October. See https://sonsbeek.org/nl_nl/sonsbeek-26.
This positive development prompted two organizations in Arnhem to invite me to give a lecture. The first addressed the question: Who were the creators of the Sonsbeek exhibition—the face of the event, but also the ones responsible for how the editions were received? The second lecture took place on 11 February and was titled The Sonsbeek Exhibition in the Perspective of Globalization. Both lectures were delivered in Dutch. More about it in my former blog (in Dutch).
During the lecture, I discussed various examples, including the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, and Manifesta, the second Dutch initiative for a large-scale, recurring European art exhibition. While preparing, I recalled a contribution by Kristina Norman for the edition that took place in St. Petersburg, though I could not remember all the details. The day after my lecture, I received an answer to my question about those details from Hedwig Fijen, the director of Manifesta. The response is noteworthy, therefore, with Hedwig Fijen’s permission, I would like to share it here as a supplement to my lecture.
“Kristina Norman has been invited in spring 2014 as an Estonian artist to make a site specific installation for M10 St Petersburg and proposed to Kasper Konig to work on the Palace Square in front of the Winterpalace of the Hermitage Museum. It was a surprise that Manifesta 10 received the permit to develop a work there since the work of Norman was a green tower steel installation in the form of a Maidan tree which represented the illegal invasion of Russia in the Crimea and the Maidan revolution in KIYV. Cynically the moment the sculpture on the Palace Square was set up the MH17 plane was crashed and Russian citizens went to the sculpture and inserted paper planes with the message that they stood together with the Dutch people who lost 200 citizens. The sculpture stood there for more than 1 month and workshops and lectures were held in the Hermitage about the subject of the Maidan Revolution. Petrowsky (director of the Hermitage Museum – MvM) later told me (Hedwig Fijen – MvM) that the palace square belongs to the territorial area of the museum, and that is why the police allowed him to raise the sculpture with a political message to stand there and to be maintained for so-called scientific reasons. It still a mystery that this was allowed. The Dutch de Volkskrant was publishing an double spread article by Rutger Pontzen named “Hedwig Fijen needs to leave Russia immediately”: arguing that M10 should immediately leave the country when the MH17 was shot. The local communities, especially the LGBTH+, argued that we should absolutely stay as long as we were able to critically reflect on political issues, which we did. We were supported by the majority of the artists.”