ASAD RAZA

At Carriageworks in Sydney, on the site of the former Eveleigh Railway Yards, Asad Raza’s project Absorption filled the Clothing Store with approximately 300 tonnes of a new soil mixture, or “neosoil”. The work continued to grow over the course of the project, tended to regularly by a team of “cultivators”. Through these processes, Absorption addressed the living and changing nature of both the political and biological ecosystems that shape today’s world.

Raza conceives of exhibitions as metabolic entities, zones of activity in which he constructs scenarios between visitors and participants. Past works include untitled (plot for dialogue), 2017, which saw Raza install a tennis court in a deconsecrated church in Milan; and Root sequence, Mother tongue, first shown at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, wherein the artist created a forest of twenty-six living trees with human caretakers.

Presented in conjunction with Carriageworks, and developed in collaboration with the University of Sydney Institute of Agriculture, Absorption transformed the Clothing Store into a site for active processes, collaborations and conversations. Cultivators tested, monitored and mixed different materials—including sand, silt, clay, phosphates, lime, cuttlefish bones, legumes, spent barley from a Marrickville brewery, coffee grounds and green waste—in order to create a new composite soil. In the closing days of the project, visitors were free to take soil for their own uses, allowing Absorption to develop into the future.

Raza invited local artists Daniel Boyd, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Megan Alice Clune, Dean Cross, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Jana Hawkins-Andersen, Khaled Sabsabi and Ivey Wawn to create interventions in the form of installations, performances and experiments. Gothe-Snape’s cultivator uniforms featured fabric from archival John Kaldor Fabricmaker samples; Hawkins-Andersen’s clay figurines were made by cultivators on site, then broken down and raked into the soil; Sabsabi’s interest in Sufi mysticism informed his work Unseen, wherein twenty pieces of kikuyu turf were buried under the soil.

Raza drew together the approaches and ontologies of art and science, allowing for absorption to take place across multiple levels in the creation of this work. “Absorption dramatises the differences between art and science, but it also shows us what they have in common”, wrote the Sydney Morning Herald’s John McDonald. “Artists, like scientists, are constantly pushing back the frontiers of the thinkable.”

Absorption was later presented at the Gropius Bau, Berlin, in 2020, the 2021 Ruhrtriennale, and at the CCA Glasgow in 2022.