A plagiarism row has broken out at Manifesta 16 Ruhr. The Bochum-based sculptor Dorothee Bielfeld has asked the biennial's organizers to remove Nasan Tur's installation Elevation (2026) from the exhibition, alleging that it plagiarizes her earlier work Aufrichten (Raising Up) from 2010. The claim was first reported by ArtNews.

Bielfeld's 2010 work was created for a cultural campaign in the Ruhr region and consisted of 29 wooden church pews standing upright. Tur's Elevation, shown as part of this year's Manifesta, likewise features standing church pews — in his case engraved with anonymous statements collected from members of the local community. Bielfeld argues that the concept and the imagery are too close to her own precedent to be coincidence.

A spokesperson for Manifesta 16 responded that the biennial stands by its curators, Leonie Herweg and Rene Block, who judged Tur's installation to be artistically independent, "without prejudice" — the biennial's formulation suggesting the judgment was made with a neutral mind. The statement stops short of addressing the specifics of Bielfeld's complaint.

The dispute surfaces in the closing stretch of the nomadic biennial's sixteenth edition, staged across Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen and Bochum. The edition has taken Germany's wave of deconsecrated churches as its main venues and thematic thread, which makes a conflict over church-pew imagery particularly pointed. Plagiarism allegations at major international biennials are uncommon, and the case raises familiar questions about where homage ends and copying begins — and how far a concept, as opposed to a finished object, can be claimed as an artist's own.