Manifesta 16 Ruhr  Churches on a New Mission

Manifesta 16 Ruhr is reimagining what shared spaces can become. Titled This is not a church, the biennial has transformed 12 former or at-risk post-war church buildings across Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum into active sites for art, community, play and public participation.

In Bochum’s Gethsemane Church, the air smells not of incense but of food. At the front, cooking takes place; at the back, set tables await guests. The artist Mehtap Baydu formed a collective of 12 women from Bochum for the performance Analı Kızlı – With Mothers and Daughters. Together they prepare a meal for a large group of guests from various backgrounds who wouldn't usually meet in their everyday lives.

The dishes are chosen for their names: Turkish words that refer to women or parts of the female body: Dul Avrat Çorbası (widow’s soup), Dilber Dudağı (the beloved’s lips) and Analı Kızlı (with mothers and daughters). Instead of making it a folkloric celebration, Baydu turns food into an act of community-building, solidarity and social critique. In the garden, Marina Naprushkina's bouncy castle is emblazoned with the words: “Wir gehen nicht! We’ll never go back!”

What Can a Church Be Today?

This scene alone sets the tone for Manifesta 16 Ruhr. The church here is treated not as a silent gallery but as a place of activity and encounter. Migration appears as a lived experience that has defined generations in the Ruhr region - present in food, language, laughter and family stories.

Under the title This is not a church, Manifesta 16 explores the future of these spaces. The question is neither how to preserve them as objects of nostalgia nor how to repurpose them as art halls, but something more fundamental: what purpose can a church serve today, once it loses its original function?

A biennial that takes time

The 16th edition of the nomadic European biennial needs more than a few hours. It is not held in a museum, or even within a single location, but is spread across 12 churches in four different cities: Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum. Seeing it in its entirety takes time.

And that is precisely part of the festival’s concept. Manifesta is aimed less at an international art audience moving from one artwork to the next than at local residents. They pass these buildings in their everyday lives, on the way to school, work or the shops. The term “Pantoffelkirche”, literally “slipper church”, captures the intended proximity: these are churches in the neighbourhood; they are embedded in daily life.

Hedwig Fijen, founder and long-time director of Manifesta, describes this approach as a reversal of the standard curatorial question. The starting point was not what kind of exhibition to make, but rather a different set of questions: where are we? What is happening here? What do citizens actually need? And what can Manifesta achieve together with existing local structures?

Signs of renewal

Many of the churches were built in the post-war period and constructed amidst the rubble of the heavily bombed Ruhr region, at a time when communities were seeking new forms of communal life. They served not only as places of worship, but also as neighbourhood anchors and symbols of a democratic new beginning. Today, many of these buildings stand empty; some face demolition. Manifesta sees them as a still largely untapped resource.

Bochum shows how differently that idea can be realised. In Christ-König and St. Anna, the works are politically charged and historically significant. Niklas Goldbach examines the masculine ideal of the miner and the environmental legacy of coal mining, including the pumping systems that continue to operate. Mykola Ridnyi presents young adult Ukrainian refugees engaged in disturbing children’s war games. In Glück auf in Deutschland, Pınar Öğrenci recounts the history of regional mining from a migrant perspective. Environmental destruction, war, migration and labour are not peripheral topics here, but integral parts of the Ruhr region’s industrial and cultural past.

Playing without winning

St. Ludgerus takes a different approach entirely. The former church sits between two schools, passed by young people every day. CaboSanRoque Collective and Flexo Arquitectura from Barcelona have transformed the space into a basketball court and football field. Pink-and-white markings, hoops, nets, narrow goalposts and a high wooden ceiling create an installation designed to be used, not just admired.

The aim, explains Laia Torrents Carulla of CaboSanRoque, is to create a place local residents return to again and again. Scoring is less important than the experience of missing the target: Piano strings are suspended above the basketball hoops. When a ball hits them, they produce sounds. A football that hits the post rather than the net triggers the church organ, which is connected to the playing field by cables, clamps and electronic switches. The missed shot becomes music.

From failure comes sound

This may be the sharpest idea in the whole project. Mistakes are not penalised but transformed into something positive. A missed goal produces a note; a failed attempt becomes a shared moment. No one has to win, and no one has to fully master the rules.

Transformation here is not about erasing the past. The organ is still an organ, the church is still clearly a church and the architecture continues to resonate. But the elements are connected in novel ways. A sacred instrument responds to play. A former church space becomes a resonating body.

Urban life as shared culture

St. Ludgerus touches on the core question of this year’s Manifesta: what can a church be today when it loses its original function? The four Bochum venues alone offer very different answers. Gethsemane becomes a place of encounter; Christ-König and St. Anna engage with history, migration and the present day; St. Ludgerus becomes a sound installation and a youth meeting point. The result is a temporary model for urban life with culture delivered freely, where people already are, instead of in a museum.

Churches as a resource

What remains after 4 October 2026 will be decided site by site. In Oberhausen, one answer is already taking shape: Heilige Familie Church in Oberhausen-Lirich, used as a food bank distribution point since 2007, is now also home to Go(o)d Kitchen as part of the Manifesta 16+ extension programme with cooking, building and educational workshops. Manifesta 16 Ruhr opens up ways of reimagining change: This is not a church does not mean that the church disappears; it means it can become more than what it once was.

In the next few years, several thousand churches in Germany will lose their original purpose. The second future of these buildings may have only just begun.

Manifesta 16 Ruhr runs until 4 October 2026.

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June 2026