Mining the past: art takes on the coal industry – in pictures

Manifesta 9's surrounding landscape. 'Little windows in the walls present glimpses of an empty landscape with a distant, grass-covered slagheap,' writes Adrian Searle in his review. 'The concrete supports of a now-defunct railway lead over a low viaduct to the abandoned pithead'
Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Manifesta 9

'In its broadest terms, the current Manifesta is a rejoinder to the malaise besetting many ambitious international art events, which this exhibition’s Mexican chief curator, Cuauhtémoc 'Medina, pithily describes: the feeling that there is never enough time to focus or see things properly, the despair of both participants and audiences alike' Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Manifesta 9

The Deep of the Modern, on the other hand 'fills a single building, and can be seen in a single day'
Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Manifesta 9

Among the figures of mining history are the Ashington group of pitman painters – immortalised in Lee Hall's play Photograph: Private Collection

A shot from Mike Figgis's 2001 film of Jeremy Deller The Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of a skirmish between police and picketing miners in Yorkshire in 1984 Photograph: Artangel, UK, in association with Channel 4

A shot from Duncan Campbell's film Make It New John (2009) Photograph: Courtesy Hotel, London

Michaël Matthys's installation features 1,000 A4 aquatints of the smoky steelworks that once existed in Charleroi, Belgium, the town he grew up in. The entire region fell into a massive depression following the industrial downturn of the 1950s
Photograph: Jacques Cerami Gallery, Charleroi

The 17 Tons section of the exhibition – which shows the cultural production inspired by the area's mining history – features these embroidered sayings from the years 1870-1930, stitched with homilies such as ‘Even though you are in love, you always need to eat’ and ‘Be careful with fire, coal is expensive’ Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Museum van de Mijnwerkerswoning, Eisden

A closeup of a saying Photograph: Museum van de Mijnwerkerswoning

And one more Photograph: Museum van de Mijnwerkerswoning

An homage to Marcel Duchamp's 1200 Coal Sacks – 'suspended from a ceiling like so many cured hams', writes Adrian Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Association Marcel Duchamp, Paris

Artist Tomasz Furlan, whose videowork shows him ‘operating’ his mad assembly-line machines and wearing gimcrack industrial prosthetics. The Slovenian sculptor is an heir to Keaton and Chaplin Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Tomasz Furlan

Russian miner Alexey Stakhanov, poster boy of Stalin’s Russia, who made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 Photograph: Kristof Vrancken/Time Magazine