Emscherkunst was founded in 2010 as a project of the European Capital of Culture year Ruhr.2010, with the Emschergenossenschaft — the water-management cooperative responsible for the Emscher catchment — as its lead institutional co-producer. Across editions in 2010, 2013 and 2016, all curated or co-curated by the Munich-based art historian Florian Matzner, the project commissioned site-specific work by some forty international and German artists along the Emscher's banks and on the long landscape strip of the Emscher Island between the river and the Rhine-Herne Canal. In 2019 the exhibition format gave way to the permanent Emscherkunstweg: a sculpture trail of more than two dozen works along the river's full course from its source at Holzwickede to its mouth at Dinslaken.
Emscherkunst is the open-air international of contemporary art that has, since 2010, taken the Emscher river as its continuous linear venue. The Emscher is a tributary of the Rhine that runs west across the northern Ruhr region for some eighty kilometres, from its source in Holzwickede east of Dortmund to its mouth on the Rhine at Dinslaken; for more than a century — from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until 2021 — it was used as an aboveground open wastewater channel for the industrial cities of the Ruhr, and acquired the working reputation as the dirtiest river in Germany. The continuing programme of the Emschergenossenschaft, the water-management cooperative that has been responsible for the Emscher catchment since 1899 and is one of the oldest such public-utility cooperatives in Germany, has been the long renaturalisation of the river — the decoupling of industrial and domestic wastewater into a parallel underground sewer system and the restoration of the surface watercourse as a near-natural river. The institutional argument of Emscherkunst, from its founding edition onward, was that this slow ecological transformation across decades was a continuous public subject in its own right — and that the contemporary international art exhibition was the form in which the public could be invited to engage with it.
The founding edition, Emscherkunst.2010, opened in summer 2010 as one of the principal programme strands of Ruhr.2010, the year in which the Ruhr region held the European Capital of Culture designation. The 2010 exhibition was concentrated on the Emscher Island (Emscherinsel) — the thirty-four-kilometre-long landscape strip between the Emscher and the Rhine-Herne Canal, running through Oberhausen, Bottrop, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Herne, Recklinghausen, Herten and Castrop-Rauxel — and presented some forty internationally established artists, including Mark Dion, Rita McBride, Lawrence Weiner, Tobias Rehberger and Tadashi Kawamata, whose Walkway and Tower — a wooden observation tower at Oberhausen — became one of the editions' continuing landmarks. Florian Matzner, professor of art history at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München and a long-standing specialist in art in public space, was the general curator. The catalogue, EMSCHERKUNST.2010 — Eine Insel für die Kunst (edited by Katja Aßmann and published by Hatje Cantz), set out the institutional argument for the project as a continuing engagement with the river's ecological conversion.
The 2013 and 2016 editions — westward and then end-to-end
The second edition, Emscherkunst.2013, ran from 22 June to 6 October 2013 and extended the exhibition area westward toward Duisburg and the Emscher mouth at Dinslaken. More than thirty installations and interventions were sited along the river's banks; the Dutch collective Observatorium's Warten auf den Fluss (Waiting for the River), a wooden zigzag bridge of three pavilions constructed inside the future bed of the renaturalised Emscher, became the edition's emblem. The exhibition recorded more than 255,000 visits. The third edition, Emscherkunst 2016, ran from 4 June to 18 September 2016 along a fifty-one-kilometre stretch eastward through Herne, Recklinghausen, Castrop-Rauxel and Dortmund up to the Emscher source in Holzwickede — completing the geographic sweep of the project from mouth to source across the three editions. Florian Matzner curated 2016 jointly with Katja Aßmann (then artistic director of Urbane Künste Ruhr) and Dr Simone Timmerhaus (Emschergenossenschaft); featured artists included Ai Weiwei, Mark Dion, Reiner Maria Matysik and the Observatorium group, with new works by Nevin Aladağ, atelier le balto, Massimo Bartolini, Janet Cardiff, Erik van Lieshout, Roman Signer and Tobias Zielony.
In 2019 the temporary triennial format gave way to a permanent one. The Emscherkunstweg — the Emscher Art Trail — was constituted as a continuing sculpture path along the full course of the river, integrating the works retained as permanent installations from the three Emscherkunst editions with newly commissioned pieces. The trail today comprises more than two dozen works by artists including atelier le balto, Julius von Bismarck (in collaboration with Marta Dyachenko), Rita McBride, Tadashi Kawamata, Tobias Rehberger and Silke Wagner, and follows the river over more than a hundred kilometres of cycle path from Holzwickede to Dinslaken. The permanent format runs in parallel with the completion of the renaturalisation programme: at the end of 2021 the Emschergenossenschaft reported that the river had finally been freed of wastewater across its full course — the end-state to which the long art-and-water programme of Emscherkunst had been the principal continuing public commentary.
