Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other RSS-enabled platforms, we plan to bring you a curated selection of interviews with practitioners from across the arts and architectures. For our second edition of recessed.speaks, the recessed.space podcast interview series, our Editor Will Jennings travelled to Luckenwalde, a short train-ride south of Berlin. Please save recessed.speaks to your podcast platform of choice and share to friends you think may enjoy so we can grow.
 
We returned to the fantastic E-WERK Luckenwalde, a disused power station that has been reborn by artist Pablo Wendel and curator Helen Turner as a radical place of culture as well as a functioning eco-power station. You can return to our 2023 article to discover more about E-WERK (see 00098), but this time the visit was to experience the organisation’s annual Turbine Hall commission, this year a project by artist Asad Raza.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Asad Raza now lives in Berlin. As mentioned in the conversation, Will Jennings first met Raza when the artist was producing the 2012 Tate Modern Turbine Hall project, a large-scale participatory work by celebrated artist Tino Sehgal. Since then, Asad Raza has developed his own artistic practice, with a growing international standing, especially over recent years with recent projects in Milan, Seoul, Gent, Berlin, and New York.




At E-WERK, Raza is presenting Electricity, a processional work lead by a ‘Conductor’ who takes small groups around the remarkable power station with staging posts of artworks along the way. Two of those works are by other artists invited by Raza to participate – Sung Tieu and Tino Sehgal – while Asad Raza re-presents old and configures new works for the tour. Raza’s interjections into the building and grounds include a circular garden formed of soil made from the power station’s burnt waste, a beautifully presented lump of amber, a vibrating floor sculpture, and an electrolyte salt water.

Collectively, the works considers the force of electricity, literally within a building generating electricity, but also as a process that can pass through matter, body, and time. The building itself is central to the conducted journey, allowing the visitor to not only take in Raza’s curatorial idea piece by piece, but also explore the back spaces and varying architectures of the E-WERK complex.



Raza currently has an exhibition, Thigmotaxis (the rat show),  at times, New York. It is a project created in collaboration with the city’s rat population and speaks to Raza’s intentional adaption to different spaces and contexts for each project. His 2017 project Untitled (plot for dialogue) saw a 16th century church in Milan turned into a tennis-like game arena, while in 2023 the artist created Plot for Museion in Bolzano, filling a gallery with 50 tons of artificial neosoil made from local waste materials in collaboration with soil scientists. In 2025 the artist redirected a water from Frankfurt’s river into the Portikus gallery to create a stream visitors could walk through and water is also set to feature in Raza’s in-development project for Tate Liverpool, to be revealed at the venue’s reopening in 2027.

Electricity continues at E-WERK Luckenwalde until 25 April 2027, and tour slots should be booked in advance. The exhibition is accompanied by a rotating film programme unfolding in three successive chapters, featuring works by Ana Mendieta, Doug Aitken, Raven Chacon, Harun Farocki, P. Staff, Cecilia Bengolea, Rachel Rose and Saodat Ismailova. The programme culminates in a closing symposium on 24 April 2027, bringing together contributions from Abbas Zahedi, Claudia Rankine, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Raven Chacon, and Simon Schaffer, among others.

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