Mancuka's diverse body of work investigates time, the subjectivity of history, and lost opportunity. In 2001, while he was artist–in–residence at the Neue Galerie Graz, in Austria, he produced Konference in response to the resplendent eighteenth-century baroque exhibition hall designated for his project. The work imagines one of the European Union conferences that now so frequently fill grand historic spaces across the continent. Mancuska manipulated paper in three-dimensional forms to deconstruct versions of the banal detritus of the now-absent participants, suggesting another futile gathering.
Gallery label from Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, April 22, 2009–January 4, 2010.
