INDUSTRIAL: Seidenstraßen 3000 12.09.2026 — 10.01.2027

The exhibition focuses on logistics, supply chains and global commodity flows. The starting point is the so-called ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, an intercontinental infrastructure project that China has been rolling out worldwide since 2013. It is also known as the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative or the ‘New Silk Road’. Duisburg and the Ruhr region are located at one end of it.

Together with 23 artists from 16 countries, we journey along this new infrastructure of the global economy, which significantly shapes our lives without us really noticing it. The exhibition tells of the deserts traversed, the borders crossed, the jobs lost and gained, the containers unloaded. The scenography uses basic components of the global logistics chain, namely, glass transport racks and Monobloc chairs, the world’s best-selling piece of furniture, which is (of course) manufactured in China. Globalisation is not abstract. It’s out there on the roads and tracks.

The exhibition INDUSTRIAL: Silk Roads 3000 has a double title. Silk Roads 3000 sounds like science fiction — an exotic place in the distant future. The Silk Roads never truly disappeared; they have simply changed in shape, scale and speed. Caravans no longer cross the deserts of Central Asia laden with precious silk; instead, trains, trucks and container ships carry the oil, grain, raw materials, spare parts and manufactured goods that make up our daily lives across the globe. 

The exhibition is called INDUSTRIAL because this contemporary reality is both industrial and geopolitical in its reverberations, taking the form of a massive yet largely invisible logistics network.

Our journey begins in a region intimately familiar with this history: the Ruhr. In the nineteenth century, the Ruhr was the throbbing heart of the industrial world – a cradle of wealth, poverty and revolutionary thought — before collapsing in the 1970s/1980s due to the decline of coal exploitation and steel production. Today, having been transformed by culture and logistics, the Ruhr has become one of the western endpoints of these new roads on the geopolitical map.

But to follow the flows of goods on these routes is also to follow the people who make them possible. Every commodity we consume has involved gestures, labour and sometimes alienation. INDUSTRIAL: Silk Roads 3000 asks a simple yet essential question: Who makes and transports what we consume?