A Plagiarism Complaint at Manifesta 16 Asks What the Biennial Is For
An artist has asked Manifesta to remove an installation at a Ruhr Valley church, alleging her work was copied. The complaint turns a quiet curatorial decision into a question about authorship, labour, and what a European biennial owes the people who feed it.
On 2 July 2026, an artist publicly called on Manifesta 16 to remove an installation staged inside St. Gertrude Church in Bochum, alleging that the work reproduces her own practice without credit. The complaint, reported by ARTNEWS, turns on a piece made from reclaimed church pews installed on their side, a configuration the claimant says she developed and showed elsewhere first.
What is unusual is not the accusation itself — disputes over authorship are a routine feature of the international exhibition circuit — but the venue. St. Gertrude is a working Catholic parish in the Ruhr Valley, one of several churches Manifesta 16 has colonised as it spreads across ten cities in the region. A complaint lodged inside a sacred space, against a curator who chose that space, raises a sharper question: what does a roving European biennial owe the artists and communities it borrows for the duration of a summer?
The complaint
ARTNEWS reported on 2 July 2026 that the artist is demanding the work's removal from St. Gertrude and is framing the issue as one of plagiarism rather than homage or coincidence. The contested installation consists of reclaimed church pews installed on their side inside the church, an arrangement she argues she originated. The complaint has not yet produced a public response from Manifesta's curatorial team as of the article's filing. Manifesta, founded in the 1990s as a nomadic biennial and now headquartered in Amsterdam, customarily responds to curatorial disputes through its artistic director rather than through a press office; its 2026 edition is led by a team working across the Ruhr.
The complaint lands in a part of Germany accustomed to large-scale cultural imports. The Ruhr has spent two decades reinventing itself from a coal-and-steel basin into a service-and-culture economy, and Manifesta 16 is the most ambitious European art event the region has hosted. St. Gertrude is one of dozens of ecclesiastical and industrial sites activated for the run. Whether the disputed work sits within the fair-use conventions of contemporary art or outside them is the question the complaint forces into the open.
What the two sides are saying
The claimant's position, as reported by ARTNEWS, is straightforward: she built a recognisable practice around reorienting church furniture and showing the result as sculpture, and she can demonstrate precedence. From that vantage, a similar configuration by another hand inside another church is not a coincidence to be honoured but a misappropriation to be corrected.
The institutional counter-position — implicit rather than articulated, since Manifesta has not publicly responded in the article's window — is the one biennials usually default to. Curators select from open calls, proposals, and studio visits; they cannot police every formal echo in an international, multi-venue edition. The honest version of that defence is that the biennial format selects for similarity: artists working in the same materials, the same sites, in the same eighteen-month run-up will inevitably produce parallel solutions. The harder version is that, if the precedence claim is documented, the burden of dislodging it sits with the institution, not the complainant.
A structural question the complaint exposes
Read narrowly, this is a single dispute between two practitioners. Read against the way Manifesta actually operates, it is a stress test of a particular kind of European cultural infrastructure. Manifesta is a privately funded, Netherlands-rooted biennial that travels to a different European region every two years, lifts that region into international art-world attention for a summer, and then leaves. The model depends on a steady throughput of venues willing to host, artists willing to participate, and audiences willing to attend. None of those constituencies are paid to be there; all of them extend a kind of credit the institution does not formally issue.
When an artist alleges that another artist was paid — in exhibition space, in catalogue pages, in the curatorial framing — to do something she had already done without pay, the complaint is not only about two studios. It is about the terms on which a biennial extracts work from a region's cultural ecosystem and repackages it for an international audience. The Ruhr has been notably generous in providing that ecosystem: churches, decommissioned industrial halls, civic spaces, and the volunteer labour that goes with them.
What remains unresolved
The dispute is at an early stage. ARTNEWS has not reported evidence beyond the artist's public allegation; Manifesta has not, as of 2 July 2026, issued a statement on the specific complaint. It is not known whether the claimant has filed a formal claim with the institution, what the curatorial team's selection process for the work looked like, or whether the two artists have any prior connection. The contested configuration — pews installed on their side — is sufficiently generic that precedence will turn on documentation and dates rather than on the form itself.
What is known is that the complaint has already changed the room. A church that hosted an installation now hosts a dispute, and a biennial that markets itself on regional collaboration now has to answer, in public, about how it credits the work collaboration depends on.
How Monexus framed this: the wire has run the story as an art-world controversy. Monexus treats it as a question about who absorbs the cost — financial and reputational — when a major European biennial curates a region rather than merely visiting it.