\u201cWe call this the Hell Door,\u201d artist Asad Raza explained animatedly. It\u2019s 10pm on a warm August evening, and we are standing outside a small enclosure at the back of a seafood restaurant under the Manhattan Bridge that to any other passersby would have been invisible. \u201cAre you ready?\u201d he asks and, with my OK, pulls the door open to reveal what looks like 100 rats cascading over the dumpsters stored in this small, dimly lit room and scampering away into their secret passages in the walls and floor.<\/p>\n
This foul-smelling, grime-encrusted site is just one of more than 20 that Raza, and his team of three installers \u2013 fellow artists Devyn Gallindo, Kunning Huang and Jared Packard \u2013 have identified across New York<\/a> City as prime locations for, as he calls it, \u201cpublic art for rats\u201d.<\/p>\n In a minivan rented by Raza for much of the summer, I accompanied the team on one of their regular nightly routes, watching as they fished sculptural components made of concrete, wood and burlap out of the trunk to arrange in various configurations beside garbage cans, next to sewers and under bushes. Doing so meant \u201cgoing across all of these social boundaries that the human world of New York has\u201d Raza observed, that \u201cthis world of the rats doesn\u2019t have\u201d.<\/p>\n That night alone, the team trekked from Seward Park and a public housing complex on the Lower East Side to the riverside walkways under construction beneath the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, all the way to the landscaped flowerbeds in front of the Natural History Museum and the litter-filled medians of Times Square.<\/p>\n Film still from Asad Raza\u2019s thigmotaxis, 2026. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and times, New York.<\/p>\n At most locations along the way, they also zip-tied trail cams to pipes, gates and benches, so as to capture footage of the rats\u2019 interactions with the sculptures. After retrieving an SD Card with the previous night\u2019s documentation, Huang would stay behind in the van downloading it on to a laptop so that the crew could see what they had captured. As each rat sniffed, rubbed and scampered over or through the \u201cpublic art\u201d that had newly appeared outside their veritable front doors, everyone exclaimed.<\/p>\n \u201cI was interested in doing something that wouldn\u2019t simply be fun or entertaining for rats,\u201d Raza explains, when asked how he determined what \u201cpublic art\u201d for rats would look like, \u201cbecause to me, a key part of art is that it\u2019s not exactly for anything. It doesn\u2019t necessarily have a clear purpose other than as an expression of its own form.\u201d<\/p>\n So when considering whether or not it would be \u201cpossible for the idea of art to cross the species boundary\u201d Raza recognized that he had to \u201cthink about another species\u2019 way of perceiving the world in a way that would allow us to create a similar kind of experience for them\u201d. This line of inquiry lead him to consult Michael Parsons, an animal behaviorist, as well as architects Mara Jovanovi\u0107 and Zaynab Eltaib of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), advised by Jaffer Kolb, regarding what kinds of structures, forms, materials and textures would be most sensorially captivating for rats.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we want to take them seriously as beings with their own preferences and ways of navigating the world,\u201d Raza said, \u201cI\u2019m not going to make tiny Cartesian modernist villas.\u201d Instead, rats particularly enjoy chaotic spaces with lots of entries, exits, and places to hide. \u201cThink,\u201d Parsons wrote in an email to Raza, \u201cshattered bits of rubble.\u201d This phrase stuck with the artist and has been clearly reflected in the resulting sculptures which could (like so much contemporary art) easily be mistaken for trash or debris.<\/p>\n Behind-the-scenes photography during the making of Asad Raza\u2019s thigmotaxis (the rat show). Photograph: Photos by Devyn Galindo. Courtesy of the artist and times, New York.<\/p>\n To make the sculptural components, Raza worked with Jovanovic and Eltaib at MIT casting different objects \u2013 usually items found in urban environments, such as plastic bags, styrofoam and boxes \u2013 to create molds for concrete structures. The formal language that developed was one of textured concrete surfaces punctured by balloon forms that create navigable passageways, and augmented with wooden and burlap components that hold scents well.<\/p>\n These material choices were largely informed by thigmotaxis, which is a keen sense that rats have of being in contact with a solid surface by rubbing alongside walls or structures. As night-time and semi-subterranean creatures, they use this sense to find their way and stay out of trouble, as they have poor vision but a good sense of smell.<\/p>\n In learning more about rats, their needs, behaviors and desires over the last few months, Raza said he had come to \u201cthink about them much more as animals living their own independent lives, rather than something that makes me sick or that I don\u2019t want to see\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you get over the culturally indoctrinated, visceral fear of rats,\u201d he added, he began to \u201csee them as much less threatening, and more [as] curious and circumspect creatures\u201d.<\/p>\n Asad Raza: thigmotaxis (the rat show). Installation view in New York. Photograph: Photos by Izzy Leung. Courtesy of times.<\/p>\n The project began when Raza was invited to create an exhibition for times, an alternative art space downtown. As an artist who normally produces site-specific, multi-sensory, often haptic installations \u2013 such as diverting a river through a gallery (Portikus Frankfurt, Germany), filling an exhibition space with soil created from local waste products (Carriageworks, Australia), conducting electricity through various encounters and materials in a reactivated power station (currently on view at E-WERK Luckenwalde<\/a>, Germany) \u2013 Raza started by looking beyond the white cube of the exhibition space to the broader, non-human ecosystem of New York.<\/p>\n Given that the city is not just home to nearly 9 million humans, but undoubtedly rife with countless other creatures big, small and most famously (to many New Yorkers\u2019 displeasure) approximately 3 million rats, it is not altogether surprising that Raza began to wonder: \u201cWhat would it mean to make art for rats?\u201d<\/p>\n Artifacts and documentation from the city-wide public art installations that resulted (ie the true exhibition which took place in August for our nocturnal neighbors) is now on view. Titled thigmotaxis (the rat show), this presentation features a selection of the sculptures arranged across the floor, a human-sized textured wall-work that visitors can rub against to experience thigmotaxis themselves, and a video of the rats\u2019 nocturnal encounters with the sculptures throughout the city. \u201cIt\u2019s a little bit of a love letter to New York,\u201d Raza said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe call this the Hell Door,\u201d artist Asad Raza explained animatedly. It\u2019s 10pm on a warm August evening,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-366714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}