RECKLINGHAUSEN.- What Lies Below Is Another Above begins from a simple impossibility: what lies beneath us is never simply below. Every ground is already another surface.
Bringing together Villa Romana art prize winners from 2023 to 2025, the exhibition creates an encounter between artistic practices developed independently across different geographies, languages, and political concerns. The works retain the autonomy of their own trajectories while encountering another territory, another institutional history, and another material imagination in Recklinghausen.
The Ruhrgebiet offers particularly charged ground for this encounter. Extraction has shaped its landscapes, architectures, economies, and social histories. What happened underground transformed everything above it: cities, infrastructures, forms of labour, migration, bodies, and environments. Beneath the surface lie tunnels and abandoned infrastructures alongside histories of class struggle, displacement, and generations of migrant and racialised labour. Geology and social history sediment within the same ground.
Moving through oral histories and archives, ritual and ecology, agriculture and industry, sound and memory, the works follow displaced materials, suppressed histories, migrant bodies, plants, frequencies, spirits, and forms of knowledge that escape dominant regimes of visibility. They inhabit disturbed landscapes, attending to what survives, mutates, returns, or takes root.
The Kunsthalle itself, transformed after the Second World War from an air-raid bunker into a space for art, carries the material memory of destruction and reconstruction. Here, underground and surface cease to describe a simple vertical hierarchy. Every below can become the surface of another world.
What emerges is a landscape made of many landscapes: Florence and Recklinghausen, plantations and mines, domestic spaces and industrial terrains, archives and bodies, earth and atmosphere.
What lies below is another above.
Curated by Dr. Elena Agudio (Director, Villa Romana) and Mistura Allison (Curator and Project Coordinator, Villa Romana).
What Lies Below Is Another Above is the second chapter of Mutual Presence, a collaborative exhibition project between Villa Romana in Florence and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen. Mutual Presence also represents an exchange between Germany’s oldest art prize of all, the Villa Romana Prize, established in 1905, and the first municipal art prize of the post-war period, the junger westen, established in 1948 in Recklinghausen.
Mutual Presence began with Tales of Traces, Stones and Moonlight., an exhibition presenting the three most recent recipients of the “junger westen” art prize at Villa Romana in Florence from 6 June to 31 July 2026. Curated by Dr. Nico Anklam (Director, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen), with Kerstin Weber-Bauman (Research Curator, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen) and Theresa Widua (Curatorial Assistant, Kunsthalle Recklinghausen).
