by Işıl İlkter // Sept. 22, 2026
Asad Raza’s exhibition ‘Electricity’ at E-WERK Luckenwalde challenges our understanding of a power station by turning its materials and processes into bodily encounters. He connects, or “stitches together,” in the artist’s words, the different spaces of E-WERK into an exhibition that also incorporates works by Tino Sehgal and Sung Tieu. Visitors experience the show on guided tours in small groups, led by one of the five conductors, who moves them through the site, providing context and performing or activating works along the way. The conductors work from an outline, with room for their own ways of thinking and speaking. The performance takes shape through their exchanges with visitors, whose responses, movements and attention become part of the work.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
Our tour begins at the door of the regenerative power station in the post-industrial town of Luckenwalde, south of Berlin. The stained-glass image of a hand clasping lightning above the door and the golden light of the entrance already lend a sense of spectacle to the idea of electricity. The first work our conductor introduces is ‘Ēlektron’ (2026), a sculpture by Raza that incorporates amber. Amber is fossilized tree resin that can acquire a static charge when rubbed, allowing it to attract small, light objects. And “ēlektron” is the ancient Greek word for amber, from which our electrical vocabulary derives.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
The next work can be heard from afar: Sung Tieu’s ‘Song for radio’ (2021/2026), featuring a VEB-Stern radio and transmitter. According to our conductor, the radio transmits recordings from the factory where it was manufactured. These sounds bring another site of production into the building. The radio draws attention to its own material history, allowing us to hear something of the infrastructure behind an everyday object.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
Outside, a large pile of wood chips waits to enter the station’s production cycle. Our conductor explains that they come from forests around Treuenbrietzen and are made from waste wood. Their presence makes the boundary of the exhibition difficult to locate. Beside them, ‘Ash Garden’ (2026), a circle of ash and charcoal from the power station’s burnt wood chips, mixed with soil and compost, gives the station’s residues another material life. Raza’s intervention lies partly in bringing these stages into view together. It makes a relationship legible that we might otherwise walk past, raising the question of where the work resides—in the materials, their arrangement or the attention given to them.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
In the engine room, our conductor winds the handle of Raza’s ‘Generation (solo)’ (2026), a Wimshurst machine developed in the early 1880s to generate high-voltage static electricity. There is something unexpectedly arresting about witnessing electricity being generated through such a simple gesture. Nearby, we are offered a sip of Raza’s ‘Electrolyte’ (2026), made with salt, water and lemon. Among the machinery, the invitation to drink this mixture feels almost disarmingly modest. ‘Electrolyte’ brings the scale of the encounter down to a glass held in the hand and a liquid taken into the body, while the association with our own electrolytes places our bodies within the exhibition’s inquiry into conductivity.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
In the Turbine Hall, ‘E-WERK Vibrations’ (2026), by Raza and Rafay Rashid, is a vibrating platform where visitors are encouraged to lie down. The vibration is jarring, giving physical force to the impression of becoming part of the station while making it difficult to settle into comfortable contemplation. This is where Raza and Rashid’s intervention feels most convincing: the composed vibration changes how the hall is encountered. The building becomes something registered through the body, extending its presence beyond what its architecture allows us to see.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
Our conductor activates the crane motor, whose sound joins the composed vibrations. Raza describes developing the vibration score with Rashid from the power station’s output. On site, he asked E-WERK co-director Pablo Wendel to connect the crane motor; hearing it alongside the score revealed a musical relationship between them. The hall vibrates all together. Then everything stops. Our conductor switches off the lights, and Tino Sehgal’s ephemeral work ‘( ) kWh’ (2002–2009) takes center stage. The performer—our conductor—chants and sings the exact number of kilowatt-hours of energy currently being conserved by keeping the power cut. The sudden loss of light enhances our awareness of electricity through its apparent absence. Electricity has been organizing our access to the building throughout the tour. The sung calculation makes the interruption measurable, turning electricity saved into the substance of the performance.
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity,’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
We exit through the door into a hall where small rooms host the first chapter of the film program, ‘Electric Sublime.’ Saodat Ismailova’s ‘Melted into the Sun’ (2024) approaches energy through spiritual histories, while Cecilia Bengolea’s ‘Lightning Dance’ (2018) features Bengolea and Jamaican dancehall performers Craig Black Eagle and Oshane Overload-Skankaz, their bodies moving within a storm. Rachel Rose’s ‘Everything and More’ (2015) pairs astronaut David Wolf’s account of traveling into space and returning to Earth with images of astronaut training, liquids, light and color. After a tour so closely tied to the building’s materials, the films open questions onto other environments and scales, while the body remains a point of connection between them.
Cecilia Bengolea: ‘Lightning Dance,’ 2018, as part of ‘Electric Sublime’ 2026, installation view at E-WERK Luckenwalde // Photo by Laila Kaletta
The station’s working life also has an economic bearing on what visitors encounter. Wendel recalls that Kunststrom began when he could not pay his own electricity bill and wanted greater independence as an artist. Income from its energy sales now supports electricity production and E-WERK’s contemporary art program. The processes Raza brings into view thus help sustain the conditions for exhibiting his work.
At E-WERK, the power station keeps entering the exhibition: as wood chips piled outside, ash mixed into soil and machinery heard alongside a composed score. Raza’s ‘Electricity’ draws these elements into a sequence of bodily encounters. Its most compelling proposition is that recognizing this building as an exhibition space begins with attending to how it works, and to how we move, listen and feel within it. The exhibition is strongest when these connections become tangible: the working life of the station enters our understanding of the art, and the art changes what we notice about the station.
Exhibition Info
E-WERK Luckenwalde
Asad Raza: ‘Electricity’
Exhibition: Sept. 12, 2026-Apr. 25, 2027
kunststrom.com
Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße 73, 14943 Luckenwalde, click here for map
