What Lies Below Is Another Above - The Villa Romana Fellows in Recklinghausen

What Lies Below Is Another Above

13 September – 22 November 2026

Opening: 12 September 2026, 5PM

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Kunsthalle Recklinghausen

Große-Perdekamp-Straße 25–27

45657 Recklinghausen

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The Villa Romana Fellows in Recklinghausen

‍Samuel Baah Kortey
Monai de Paula Antunes
Rubèn D'Hers
Diana Ejaita
Jessica Ekomane
Sajan Mani
Tuli Mekondjo
Elia Nurvista
Pınar Öğrenci
Chaveli Sifre
Raul Walch
Sergio Zevallos

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Curated by Elena Agudio and Mistura Allison

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What Lies Below Is Another Above begins from a simple impossibility: that what lies beneath us is never simply below.

Every ground is already another surface.

Places are never singular. They are composed of shifting temporalities, forgotten infrastructures, buried gestures and unfinished histories that continue to inhabit the present. Rather than disappearing, worlds seep into one another, resurfacing unexpectedly through landscapes, materials, bodies and forms of relation.

Bringing together Villa Romana Fellows from 2023 to 2025, the exhibition is not organised around a single theme, nor were these works conceived in response to a curatorial framework. Developed independently, across different geographies, artistic languages and political concerns, they retain the autonomy of their own trajectories. Yet, brought into relation within the particular histories of Recklinghausen, they begin to generate new constellations. Meaning emerges not from illustrating an argument but from the encounter between singular artistic practices, a place and its multiple histories.

This is also what has long distinguished Villa Romana itself: a place where artists working from radically different positions temporarily inhabit a shared space without ever being asked to speak with one voice. What emerges is not consensus but proximity—an ecology of difference in which unexpected conversations become possible. The exhibition extends this ecology into another context, allowing existing works to resonate with another territory, another institutional history and another material imagination.

Recklinghausen and the Ruhrgebiet offer a particularly resonant ground for these encounters. Its landscape has been shaped by extraction, industrial transformation and migration. Yet extraction is never merely geological. As Kathryn Yusoff has argued, the underground is inseparable from histories of colonialism, racial capitalism and the unequal distribution of labour, bodies and resources. Beneath the surface lie not only tunnels and abandoned infrastructures, but also histories of class struggle, displacement and the often invisibilised labour performed by generations of workers, including racialised communities whose contribution remains largely absent from dominant narratives. The ground itself becomes an archive in which geology and social history can no longer be separated.

Rather than illustrating these histories, the Fellows approach them obliquely. Their practices inhabit what Anna Tsing has described as disturbed landscapes: environments transformed by extraction, displacement and ecological change, where unexpected forms of life and relation continue to emerge. Their works move through archives and oral histories, ritual and ecology, agriculture and industry, sound, memory and material culture. They attend to fragile ecologies, colonial infrastructures and more-than-human worlds; they ask how histories continue to act long after they appear to have disappeared.

These are practices that grow in the cracks; not because they celebrate rupture, but because disturbance itself becomes the condition through which other relations can emerge. They reveal passages between extraction and care, visibility and invisibility, violence and repair, human and more-than-human life. Rather than searching for stable foundations, they compose fragile ecologies of coexistence that remain open, contingent and unfinished.

The encounter takes place within a site that has itself been continually reimagined. Since its transformation from a wartime bunker into the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen after the Second World War, the building has embodied the conviction that art can participate in imagining different futures. Through the junger westen Prize, generations of artists have been invited to respond to the urgencies of their own time. This history is not the subject of the exhibition, but another resonance through which these works are encountered: a reminder that places never replace what came before; they continually accumulate new meanings.

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The project is part of Mutual Presence, a collaborative project between Villa Romana in Florence, Italy, and Kunsthalle Recklinghausen in Germany - institutions connected to two of Germany’s longest-standing art prizes.

Mutual Presence began with Tales of Traces, Stones and Moonlight., an exhibition presenting the three most recent recipients of the “junger westen” art prize in Florence from June 6 to July 31, 2026. Curated by Nico Anklam, with Kerstin Weber-Baumann, research curator and Theresa Widua, curatorial assistant from Recklinghausen.

The second chapter of Mutual Presence will open on 12 September 2026 at Kunsthalle Recklinghausen. Curated by Elena Agudio and Mistura Allison, the group show What Lies Below Is Another Above will bring together the Villa Romana Fellows 2023, 2024, and 2025, presenting their work in Recklinghausen.

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