DUSSELDORF.- The exhibition Land and Soil. How We Live Together, on view at K21 of the Kun- stsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, focuses on the ways in which we live together as human beings. It addresses themes such as war, displacement, flight, and the destruction of nature, but also reconstruction and regeneration, housing, cultivation, ownership, and sharing. The exhibition invites visitors to envision possibilities for a just and sustainable future. For the first time, an exhibition extends across the entire K21 and the adjacent Ständehaus- park, also focusing on the ground on which the museum stands — both geographically and historically. Drawing from the building’s parliamentary past, thirty-four international artists and collectives explore various forms of resource management, ranging from Indigenous economic practices and collective ownership to utopian blockchain projects.
Earth, coal, lotus silk, pine needles, chocolate: The exhibition goes back to basics in terms of materials and forms. It appeals to both the senses and the mind. Land and Soil takes us to Brazil, Korea, Congo, Japan, the United States, China, Peru, Vietnam, Iraq, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, and back to Germany. It traces the fantasies of libertarian pioneers who want to found their own states or conquer Mars. And it looks at an important basis of industrial prosperity in the Rhineland: coal. Several works deal with the history of coal mining.
On the last day, a performance by Asche Lützerathi (supported by JP Raether) takes visitors to Hambach, Europe’s largest open-cast lignite mine.
Self-Governance: Freedom 500 Years Ago and Today
The focus is on the question of self-governance. Five hundred years ago, at the dawn of letterpress printing and financial capitalism, German peasants rose up against privatization and an increasingly opaque network of responsibilities and taxes. Alex Wissel questions the legacy of the German Peasants’ War in wall drawings of peasant protests then and now. Under the glass dome of K21, Ugo Rondinone presents hundreds of gilded tools that his grandfather forged after he, an Italian immigrant in New York at the end of the nine- teenth century, could only afford a small plot of land. Next to this, in a video installation by Maria Thereza Alves, Indigenous agroforestry agents explain how they manage a forest area in the Amazon the size of Brandenburg without support from the Brazilian government. Their methods show how growth is possible for all living beings when the synergies of nature are harnessed.
Grace Ndiritu has nature appear in a protest march in which participants wear animal and plant costumes. Tapestries depict historical demonstrations for land rights and women’s rights. Meditation cushions are arranged around a photograph depicting a meeting between the Artist Placement Group (1966-89) and representatives from Düsseldorf’s business and administrative circles at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle in 1971.
In the same year, also in Düsseldorf, Chris Reinecke and Lutz Mommartz occupied Gus- taf-Gründgens-Platz in front of the Schauspielhaus to protest against politicians turning a blind eye to rack-renting. Mommartz’s film, Mietersolidarität (Tenant Solidarity), features Reinecke delivering a speech against speculation with “land and soil.” In addition to Reinecke’s protest posters advocating “Tenant Solidarity,” her satirical designs for self-built settlements and vegetable beds in the Hofgarten, Germany’s first public park, which opened in 1769, are also on display. In Ständehauspark, opposite K21, Havîn Al-Sîndy is rebuilding a room from the loam house in which she grew up in the autonomous Kurdistan Region in Iraq. Loam houses are one of the oldest and most widespread types of construction. They are literally built from the ground on which they stand. Meanwhile, Ximena Garrido-Lecca transforms basic elements of huts, such as those built by internal refugees on the coast of Peru since the 1950s, into sculptures made of copper — the raw material whose mining has impoverished the Andean population.
In his three-channel video installation, Liu Chuang also looks to the mountains, in this case in Southeast Asia, where mountain peoples are losing their autonomy after thousands of years. Liu Chuang compares mountain peoples to blockchain miners who, in search of cheap energy, migrate across the country with the seasons like migratory birds. The utopia of self-governance without a nation state is also explored in an expansive video installation by Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Members of the Tamil diaspora question the legacy of the Tamil war of independence in Sri Lanka, which was crushed in 2009, and seek alter- natives to the conflicts of the present driven by questions of identity.
On a former palm oil plantation in Congo owned by the Unilever Group, the utopia of self- governance is becoming a reality: Here, the self-taught artists of the collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art
League, CATPC) are reworking the legacy of colonialism in sculptures made of clay. The sculptures are 3D-scanned, cast in chocolate, and sold on the art market. With the pro- ceeds, CATPC has so far re-naturalized twenty hectares of land and built a local museum. In 2024, CATPC exhibited in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale. Thanks to the first digital restitution via blockchain, CATPC obtained a loan from the Richmond Museum of Art in Virginia of a wooden figure of the Pende people, which was created in 1931 in connection with an uprising against Belgian colonial rule in their area. The figure depicts a vio- lent Belgian officer and is also on display in Ground and Soil. In a hand-drawn map, CATPC provides a global picture of exploitation and commodity flows.
An Assessment of Blockchain in Art
Blockchain technology plays a role in many of the works on display. Ground and Soil is also an assessment of this important trend in art over the last fifteen years. It becomes clear that while blockchain has given rise to new ideas of collective ownership and decentralized management of goods, state structures are now mostly being used again to implement them. terra0, for example, manages a forest biotope in Brandenburg via blockchain and German association law, and has done pioneering legal work in coordination with the taxa- tion authority. With Sybling, Sarah Friend and JP Raether are designing a care community of associations and limited liability companies that aims to overcome individual ownership. Simon Denny translates digital real estate offers in metaverses into landscape paintings.
And Johannes Büttner travels with his camera to Liberland, a self-proclaimed cryptostate between Serbia and Croatia that issues a passport and a plot of land for $10,000 in Bitcoin. There, Büttner encounters appropriations of the concept of freedom in libertarian thinking, as it is spreading in the crypto scene, in Silicon Valley, and most recently in governments in Argentina and the United States: There, freedom means liberating the markets from the state, even by authoritarian means. In a conversation documented in the catalog, Büttner, Alex Wissel, and Lyndal Roper, a historian from the University of Oxford, compare con- cepts of freedom and apocalyptic thinking at the time of the Peasants’ War and today.
Wars Then and Now
The new dimension of violence that emerged in the religious wars of the sixteenth century is depicted in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, in which skeletons chase down humans. A detail from the painting is reproduced on a twenty-meter-wide canvas hanging above the piazza of K21. It comes from Alex Wissel’s stage design for Eisenfaust, a Götz von Berlichingen interpretation directed by Jan Bonny at the Schauspiel Köln, and complements the aforementioned wall drawings. The scene is reminiscent of today’s wars. Dor Guez presents a pressed specimen of khubeiza, a mallow variety that grows in the Levant and is eaten during famines because of its high nutritional content, as is currently the case with Guez’s relatives in Gaza. Boris Mikhailov’s photographs highlight the social dis- parities that have emerged in Ukraine since it gained independence. And in a new film by Nir Evron, the soil itself recalls the Nazi war economy and its experiments with substitutes made from coal and Kazakh dandelions under forced labor.
Amidst all this, Lin May Saeed’s portrayal of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” who were put into a two-hundred-year sleep by God to protect them from Roman persecution of
Christians, conveys a sense of profound calm and patience. Furthermore, in this depiction, animals and humans are part of an equitable community.
K21 and Its History as a Parliament Building
The exhibition bridges distant realities of life while consciously situating itself within Düsseldorf’s economic and artistic history, with artists such as Havîn Al-Sîndy, Joseph Beuys, Andreas Gursky, Simone Nieweg, Chris Reinecke, Thomas Ruff, and Alex Wissel. The exhibition also deliberately locates itself in the place where it is held. The former Ständehaus on the Kaiserteich was the first parliament building constructed in the Rhineland. Its historicist Neo-Renaissance architecture, like the Peasants’ War, dates back five hundred years to the origins of today’s knowledge system and economic order. Built between 1876 and 1880 according to plans by Julius Raschdorff — who later became the architect of Berlin Cathedral — the Ständehaus served as the Prussian provincial parliament, where representatives of the estates discussed regional issues. From 1949 to 1988, it was the seat of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament. After extensive renovations, the building reopened in 2002 with an iconic glass dome and became a museum for international contemporary art belonging to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. The Ständehaus also continues to serve as a representative building for the state government.
With works by: Havîn Al-Sîndy, Maria Thereza Alves, Asche Lützerathi (otherhosted by Sybling – JP Raether & Sarah Friend), Joseph Beuys, AA Bronson, Johannes Büttner, Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Planta- tion Workers Art League, CAPTC), Liu Chuang, Simon Denny, Jan Dibbets, Nir Evron, Simone Fattal, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Jef Geys, Robert Gober, Dor Guez, Andreas Gursky, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Richard Long, Boris Mikhailov, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lutz Mommartz, Grace Ndiritu, Simone Nieweg, Chris Reinecke, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Ruff, Lin May Saeed, Shimabuku, terra0, Ron Tran, Franz West, Alex Wissel
