Between Creating and Collecting

With works by: Arhun Aksakal, Cosima von Bonin, Stella Flatten, Marlin de Haan, Paula Pedraza, Franziska Pierwoss & Jonas Leifert, Ramona Schacht & Luca Bublik, John Smith, Nesrin Tanç, Alfredo Thiermann, Iris Touliatou, Anna R. Winder.

Traces of the Middle Ages, remains of industrial history, postmodern architecture, and recreation for local residents all come together in the diverse cityscape of the Duisburg Inner Harbour. That this was once Europe’s largest terminal for storing and handling grain is hardly visible today. In the 1990s, it was redeveloped into a residential and recreational area according to a masterplan designed by Sir Norman Foster in conjunction with the International Architecture Exhibition Emscher Park, or IBA Emscher Park for short. According to Foster's plan, the warehouse buildings were either to be restored according to historical models or to be replaced by ultra-modern glass and concrete buildings. In addition to this, a number of institutions focusing on history are located within this relatively small area, including the City Archive, the Centre of Commemorative Culture, the State Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the Garden of Memories by artist Dani Karavan, which embeds fragments of former industrial buildings within an artificial landscape.

In the context of the interdisciplinary arts festival Ruhrtriennale, the exhibition primarily presents new sculptural, conceptual, performative, and audio-visual works by international artists who provide a contemporary perspective on the Inner Harbour while exploring processes of creating, overlaying, and failure. Exploring a place like Duisburg’s Inner Harbour through art means not only looking at it from an aesthetic point of view; it also means investigating, commenting on, and relating to its economic, architectural, and even psychological past and present from different perspectives. The exhibition with works by twelve artists is spread out over eleven locations that form a finely woven network of references spanning between empirical historiography and postmodern invention.

While Stella Flatten and Alfredo Thiermann focus on the soil by engaging with the ground as a metaphor and a historical archive, the artworks by Arhun Aksakal, Cosima von Bonin, and John Smith reflect and comment on the architecture on site. Marlin de Haan, Paula Pedraza, Iris Touliatou, and Anna R. Winder devote themselves to sometimes suspenseful, sometimes experimental forms of storytelling with a location-specific connection. Nesrin Tanç, Franziska Pierwoss & Jonas Leifert, and Ramona Schacht & Luca Bublik make use of in-depth archival research, examining the societal consequences of local industrial production.

Some projects were developed as part of the programme Zu Gast bei Urbane Künste Ruhr. Artistic Director: Britta Peters / Curated by Alisha Raissa Danscher and Britta Peters.