Urbane Künste Ruhr

With Absorption, Asad Raza has developed a living piece of great sensual, poetic and scientific power. It deals with and consists of soil – and takes up the entire floor of the huge building, which had been among other things a department market and a bank previously.

The soil is artificial and composed of waste materials and ingredients from the Ruhr sourced by Raza and his team of cultivators. The ingredients include sand, spent barley, human hair, pigeon excrement, cacao husks, clay, compost, fabric and cardboard from cultural institutions of the region, and more, all of which are mixed to create new earth – called Neosoil by Raza. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the cultivators is on site, continuing to add material, mix, turn over, and analyze the Neosoil, under scientific supervision. During the entire exhibition this newly produced fertile soil is given away to visitors, and any left over will be donated to allotment associations and social institutions.

Invited by Asad Raza, three artists will add to the project: Maria Renee Morales Garcia and Agatha Gothe-Snape add sculptural and apparel to the process while Tony Conrad’s sound work Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain provides an absorptive moment of a different kind.

The exhibition is curated by Britta Peters, artistic director of Urbane Künste Ruhr, and is our contribution to the Ruhrtriennale 2021.

Absorption was originally commissioned and presented by Kaldor Public Art Projects (Sydney, 2019), and was also presented at Gropius Bau (Berlin, 2020).