A former pumping station of the Emschergenossenschaft is now an installation; the name it retains has an auspicious ring to it: Königsgrube — the King’s Mine. The past and the present shape Markus Jeschaunig’s work in which he has transformed fragments of the dismantled building into a hybrid landscape.From 1860 to 1967, coal mining at…

Two large triangles together constitute a third triangular form. Their waist-high walls are about one metre thick; they both taper and flatten towards the ground. The sculpture Pool Lines by Mexican artist Sofía Táboas is clad with shimmering green mosaic tiles. Are these the archaeological remains of a swimming pool from times when the Emscher…

The sculpture Emscher Folly is located in an open space between the Duisburg Alte Emscher wastewater treatment plant, the Bruckhausen steelworks by the Alter Emscher river and the Alsumer Berg slag heap. Nearby is where the Emscher originally flowed into the Rhine. Here, artist Nicole Wermers has welded dozens of bicycles onto a steel structure…

From the very first beginning it was the idea of the artist Andreas Strauss to create a network of these unusual accommodation options. The first dasparkhotel was built in Austria in 2005. In May 2022, »dasparkhotel_inside-outsite« was opened at Hof Emscher-Auen in Castrop-Rauxel as part of the artistic revision and expansion of the Emscherkunstweg. It is…

David Jablonowski’s hybrid sculpture is located directly next to the Emscher-Weg bike path in the Schüren district of Dortmund. In it, the artist, who grew up in Bochum, explores the history and future not only of this particular place, but of the entire Ruhr area as well. At the same time, he has created a…

Julius von Bismarck is one of the first artists to have been invited to develop a new work for the Emscherkunstweg, which was inaugurated in 2019. Together with the artist and architect Marta Dyachenko he conceived the installation »Neustadt« (New City), which is located on a grassy area in Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord, between the Alter…

Situated between the renaturated Emscher river in Dortmund-Huckarde and the Emscher bike trail is the work »Zur kleinen Weile« (For a short spell) by the Berlin collective raumlabor. It was created for the third edition of the Emscherkunst exhibition in 2016 which showed temporary art in the eastern part of the Ruhr region, stretching from…

As the site for her contribution to the 2010 Emscher Art exhibition artist Silke Wagner chose the former sewage plant in Herne. Besides BernePark and the disused sewage plant in Läppkes-Mühlenbach, it is one of the three decommissioned sewage treatment facilities located between Emscher river and the Rhine-Herne Canal that have been preserved as publicly…

For his work »Walkway and Tower«, Tadashi Kawamata chose a location close to the waterway junction of the Emscher river and the Rhine-Herne Canal on the city margins between Recklinghausen and Castrop-Rauxel. It is situated at the eastern tip of the so-called Emscher Island, a 34-km strip of land running between the river and the…

The Kunstakademie Münster (Academy of Fine Arts Münster) was invited to develop a contribution for each of the three editions of Emscherkunst. In an internal competition in 2016 altogether fifteen projects were selected by the academy and realised under the title »Stadt Raum Bewegung« (City Space Movement) in the vicinity of Rheinische Strasse in Dortmund.…

Being a flat, languid river, the Emscher was never suitable for industrial inland shipping, even though in the process of being straightened it was debated whether it should be converted for this purpose. Instead, in the early 20th century the Rhine-Herne Canal was constructed, which today is still one of the busiest freight transport routes…

Originally, »Spirits of the Emscher Valley« was intended for the 2016 Emscherkunst exhibition as a kind of parkour linking three sculptures. The »spirits« consisted of the two works »Vogelfrau« (Bird woman) and »Totem mit Elster« (Totem with magpie) that were installed during the exhibition on the southern shore of the Phoenix Lake in Dortmund’s Hörde district,…

Located at Hof Emscher-Auen in the Mengede district of Dortmund is the work »Black Circle Square« that was developed by Massimo Bartolini for the 2016 Emscherkunst exhibition. Looming out of the middle of the sweeping landscape around the flood retention basin is a gleaming white square surface measuring 10.5 x 10.5 metres along the perimeter…

For safety reasons, the «Kunstpause» installation on the Emscherkunstweg was unfortunately dismantled in August 2024. The larch wood of the construction of footbridges and terraces has been damaged by a fungus due to the age of the wood and the damp weather. The hazelnut grove is still accessible and all those involved are examining what…

For the 2016 Emscherkunst exhibition Henrik Håkansson erected two cuboid edifices in a field behind the timber-frame farmhouse of the Emscherquellhof in Holzwickede. The two minimalist sculptures are based on an open, grid-shaped structure of six-by-six cubes reminiscent of Sol LeWitt’s iconic Concept art of the 1960s: the basic element of his three-dimensional work was…

In the Ruhr region there are over 250 waste tips – up to 140 metres high, artificial mountains of mining waste, slag and rubble – witnesses to mining and industrial history. Since the late 1980s many of these tips have been transformed as part of the Internationale Bauausstellung (International Architecture Exhibition, IBA) »Emscher Park«, with…

On the Emscher island near the Gelsenkirchen Locks, just a short distance from the cycle path next to the Emscher one unexpectedly encounters a huge rock formation. As one approaches, a quiet music becomes audible that seems to be emanating from inside the mountain. Embedded on sand, the mountain has a strange appearance, as if…

For his contribution to the 2010 Emscherkunst exhibition Mark Dion had a disused gas tank converted into a kind of bird observatory. He came across the object at the former Herne sewage treatment plant, where the artist Silke Wagner also realised her work »Glückauf. Bergarbeiterproteste im Ruhrgebiet« (see no. 42). Entitled »Society for Amateur Ornithologists«,…

Can you imagine hotel rooms that are as simple and uncomplicated to use as a station luggage locker? Prompted by this idea, the artist Andreas Strauss developed his project »dasparkhotel«. For this, he converted commercially available sewage pipes into sleeping cabins that can be used individually by overnight guests at all hours, just by means…

In the 1990s, in connection with the restoration the Emscher river to a close-to-natural condition and the construction of an enormous, subterranean wastewater canal, numerous relatively small sewage treatment plants were shut down. One of those to close in 1997 was the plant in the Bottrop-Ebel district, where the Berne river flows into the Emscher.…

The two artists Mischa Kuball and Lawrence Weiner were invited to each contribute a work to the 2010 Emscherkunst exhibition. Their collaboration first developed during the preparations and planning for the former Bottrop-Ebel sewage treatment plant, which resulted in the joint work »CATCH AS CATCH CAN«. The present-day BernePark instantly appealed to a number of…

In connection with the 2013 Emscherkunst exhibition the artists’ group Inges Idee (Inge’s Idea) created the enormous sculpture »Zauberlehrling«, visible from a great distance and installed in the tree and shrub garden at Haus Ripshorst in Oberhausen. Inspired by the protagonist in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s eponymous balled, the artists appear to have brought an…

Forming 496 hoops, the spiralling bridge »Slinky Springs to Fame« coils nonchalantly across the Rhine-Herne Canal in Oberhausen. Tobias Rehberger designed the bridge as a contribution to the Emscherkunst exhibition during Essen’s year as Capital of Culture in 2010, situating it in the place where a now disappeared bridge once connected the Emscher island with…

The construction of the new underground Emscher wastewater canal in 2013 required relocating the youth club »emscherdamm« and its playground from their previous location in the Holten district of Oberhausen to a new home on the nearby site of a former recreation ground and the adjacent skate spot. After two project proposals by other architects…