Hedwig Fijen to Depart as Founding Director of Manifesta
3May 5, 2026
Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial launched in 1996, is losing its founding director,Hedwig Fijen. Fijen announced that she would depart on October 5. She began working onManifestain 1991, when she was commissioned by the Netherlands Office for Fine Arts in The Hague to develop a pan-European platform. The biennial’s first edition took place in Rotterdam; subsequent iterations were staged in cities including Palermo, Italy (2018); Pristina, Kosovo (2022); and Barcelona (2024).Manifesta 16will be heldthis summer and fallin Germany’s Ruhr Valley.
Fijen during her tenure expanded the event’s remit beyond art, transforming the biennial into an interdisciplinary platform addressing social and urban change, assembling architects, urbanists and cultural practitioners, to research its host cities, with the goal of providing an engaging experience for both international and local visitors.
“I am deeply thankful that Manifesta has helped shape a generation of curators and cultural practitioners, contributing to a vast body of more than 1,000 newly commissioned, site-specific works,” said Fijen in a statement. “It is especially rewarding that many artists realized their first major commissions within Manifesta, even under challenging geopolitical conditions.”
The supervisory board of the International Foundation Manifesta has appointed Emilia van Lynden to serve as general director and named Catherine Nichols artistic director. Van Lynden arrived to the foundation in 2019; she is currently its deputy director. The Berlin-based Nichols was creative mediator for the 2022 iteration of Manifesta and served on the artistic board of this year’s edition. The pair will co-develop forthcoming iterations of the biennial, beginning with Manifesta 17, to take place in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2028.