MANCHESTER, England — After 147 years, Friedrich Engels is back in town. Statues of Engels, Karl Marx’s collaborator, may have been ripped down all over the former communist world, but he has returned here, to the city that made him famous.

His resurrection in Manchester, where he conducted research on the working class in the 1840s, is thanks to Phil Collins — the acclaimed artist who has made Engels the centerpiece of his most recent project, “Ceremony.”

“I started working on this theme about 10 years ago,” said Mr. Collins, who was nominated for the Turner Prize for British visual arts in 2006. Immersing himself in the history of the Industrial Revolution and of socialism in Manchester, he stumbled upon a quote by a local civil servant, who raised the idea of transporting an Engels statue from Ukraine to Manchester.

Since most Soviet-era statues were removed from their pedestals and destroyed after 1989 — and an Engels likeness was rather rarer than the ubiquitous Lenin — finding the statue was not easy. Mr. Collins traveled for about a year across Eastern Europe before finally finding his prize in an agricultural compound in a district that he said was once named after Engels in the Poltava region of eastern Ukraine.