{"id":2104037,"date":"2026-08-20T11:40:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T08:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2104037"},"modified":"2026-08-20T11:40:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T08:40:00","slug":"how-asad-raza-makes-a-show-by-creating-public-art-for-new-york-rats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2104037","title":{"rendered":"How Asad Raza Makes a Show, By Creating Public Art for New York Rats"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/003_260812_Asad-Raza-Thigmotaxis-the-rat-show-Photo-Christopher-Garcia-Valle-ARTnews.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tOne hot August afternoon on New York\u2019s Lower East Side, artist Asad Raza led this reporter through his new, unconventional public art show. Without him, you and I certainly would never have noticed it, but then it\u2019s not really for us.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve made a lot of works for people, trying to create experiences of different kinds that, a lot of the time, dealt with living elements of the environment around them,\u201d said Raza, whose projects have included exhibiting live trees in a museum, rerouting river water through an art venue, and turning trash into fertile soil. <\/p>\n

\n\tWith his newest project, Raza turned his attention to one of the countless creatures New Yorkers share their turf with: Rattus norvegicus<\/em>, the brown rat that thrives in the millions beneath our feet.\u00a0The week before he gave me a tour, the artist and a few helpers drove around the city in a minivan, placing small sculptures in public parks and other unremarkable places popular with rodents, such as fenced-off construction sites, the yards outside public housing, and trash collection spots. The sculptures were created with advice from animal behaviorist Michael Parsons, who is fascinated with urban rats.\u00a0The sculptures and documentation will go on view in \u201cThigmotaxis (the rat show),\u201d opening September 19 at the new downtown nonprofit arts venue Times. Rats\u2019 tendency to hug walls as they move, a way of reducing exposure to predators, is an example of thigmotaxis (defined as \u201can organism\u2019s movement in response to physical contact with surfaces or objects\u201d). The show will also include a wall-mounted sculpture for humans to touch, so they too can experience thigmotaxis.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt the beginning, I thought the sculptures would be much more like architecture,\u201d Raza said. \u201cBut Parsons told me, \u2018No, they like really chaotic spaces.\u2019 He said, \u2018Think shattered fragments of rubble.\u2019 Shattered fragments of rubble is a totally different vibe.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tIndeed, one could easily mistake the small gray sculptures for broken bits of construction material or cinder-block fragments. (Low-tech though they may appear, they were designed with the aid of MIT architects Zaynab Eltaib, Mara Jovanovic, and Jaffer Kolb.) Some have indentations meant to gather rainwater, and some have multiple points of entry and egress, all of which the rats apparently appreciate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Asad Raza\u2019s sculptures for rats, on view in a New York park, during the making of his exhibition \u201cThigmotaxis (the rat show),\u201d at Times, New York.<\/span>Devyn Galindo, courtesy of Asad Raza and Times, New York<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tParsons told Raza that rats\u2019 vision isn\u2019t great and that they mostly rely on smell and touch. \u201cSo I thought, those are the two senses we should try to work with,\u201d he said. He included substances that absorb scent, like burlap, and textured some of the walls and floors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAlong with the sculptures, Raza and his team\u2014artists Devyn Galindo, Kunning Huang, and Jared Packard\u2014placed cameras to capture the intended audience\u2019s nighttime reactions. He worried the rats wouldn\u2019t be interested, but when he saw them, they showed real curiosity, much to the team\u2019s elation. \u201cWhen we first started seeing videos of the rats actually interacting with them,\u201d he said, \u201cwe were just high-fiving in the van.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHe thought they might have to lure the animals by putting food among the sculptures, but that actually didn\u2019t yield results: \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Wait a second. I smell a rat.\u2019\u201d Ba-dum<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tIn Raza\u2019s Hands, Water and Earth Provide Revelations\t<\/h2>\n

\n\tAs you might guess, you wouldn\u2019t want to make the mistake of asking Raza, who lives in Berlin, what medium he works in. On his website, he says his practice \u201cconceives of art as a metabolic, active encounter within and beyond the exhibition setting.\u201d (That\u2019s after a preamble in which the Pakistani-American artist points out that there are many Asad Razas in the world, like a self-deprecating Wikipedia disambiguation section.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the inaugural Medina Triennial, currently on view in upstate New York, Raza routed water from the Erie Canal through an exhibition space; he did the same in Frankfurt, diverting the Main River through a museum, allowing visitors to wade in the liquid and filter it to make it potable. As he explained in Art in America<\/em>, <\/em>the project was partly intended to reunite people with bodies of water from which, in modern cities, they are often separated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen asked recently to name an artwork that was a \u201crevelation,\u201d poet Claudia Rankine cited Raza\u2019s Absorption <\/em>(2019), which combines waste products and other ingredients to create fertile soil, which the artist then gives away. \u201cI like to think Raza\u2019s work venerates change and growth,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbecause after everything, after all we have put our belief and trust in collapses, that\u2019s what\u2019s left.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Asad Raza\u2019s sculptures for rats, on view in New York, during the making of his exhibition \u201cThigmotaxis (the rat show),\u201d at Times, New York.<\/span>Devyn Galindo, courtesy of Asad Raza and Times, New York<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIn 2015, I wrote for Artnet News<\/em> about \u201cThe Home Show,\u201d which Raza curated in his SoHo apartment. Turning the tables, that show acted on him more than it did on anyone else: for it, he asked 36 people, including artists, friends, and family members, to intervene in his life in some way. Before that, Raza had mostly been a producer, helping Tino Sehgal realize his 2010 Guggenheim Museum show and Philippe Parreno his 2015 Park Avenue Armory installation, but he was coming into his own as an artist. Two years later, he would hit a new high with an installation at the Whitney Biennial involving a copse of trees titled Root<\/em> sequence. Mother tongue<\/em> (2017). Attendants were tasked with caring for the trees, interacting with visitors, and giving performances, as well as contributing knickknacks that would serve as totems from their past.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe Pied Piper of the Lower East Side\t<\/h2>\n

\n\tRaza talked about the diversity of his projects as we traversed the sites for the rat sculptures. \u201cEvery time,\u201d he said, \u201cit has to make you a little bit frightened of what you\u2019re doing, and make you feel a bit like this might be a stupid idea that\u2019s incredibly humiliating in some weird way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThese days, of course, it\u2019s not completely off-the-wall for an artist to make work involving other species, whether enlisting animals to help create their work, commenting on humankind\u2019s interventions in nature, or acknowledging the validity of non-human experiences of the world. Agnieszka Kurant has exhibited termite-made sculptures. Eduardo Kac bioengineered a glowing rabbit. Duke Riley choreographed an aerial ballet with pigeons. Sometimes animal rights advocates get involved, as when New York\u2019s Guggenheim Museum showed Huang Yong Ping\u2019s sculptural installation involving various species fighting to the death, and Peng Yu and Sun Yuan\u2019s video in which frustrated dogs, placed facing each other on treadmills, try to do battle.<\/p>\n

\n\tRats and mice are common subjects in biomedical research because they share physiological and genetic similarities with humans. (Another commonality, this one etymological: they live in burrows, while New Yorkers live in boroughs.) For all they\u2019ve done for us, it hasn\u2019t earned them much love; rats remain associated with filth and disease. Parsons has said that the lab rat compares to the street rat as a chihuahua compares to a wolf, and he maintains that despite their ubiquity, very little is actually known about them.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Parsons isn\u2019t the only one fascinated with these animals. Another consultant on the project was Kenny \u201cThe Rat Daddy\u201d Bollwerk, who leads tours of New York for the norvegicus<\/em>-curious.<\/p>\n

\n\tRats show up plenty in art. Banksy loves them, saying\u00a0<\/strong>in his book\u00a0Wall and Piece<\/em>that they (obviously like the street artist himself) \u201cexist without permission,\u201d that \u201cif you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model.\u201d Katharina Fritsch\u2019s giant sculpture Rat-King <\/em>(1993) refers to the strange phenomenon of a group of rodents getting bound together through an accidental intertwining of their tails. A rat is a central character in Bruce Nauman\u2019s 1988 video installation Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer)<\/em>, in which it is exposed to an inept percussionist\u2019s banging as it tries to navigate a maze, as if to mock the notion of scientific research.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat seems sadistic,\u201d said Raza on hearing about Nauman\u2019s piece. His project has left him with much more fellow-feeling for the creatures. \u201cI got to understand: they\u2019re part of this city too,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re co-denizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd they are legion. Urban legend says that rats outnumber the city\u2019s humans by as many as five to one, but a 2023 study put the number at more like three million, or about one for every three bipeds. These humble creatures can tread water for three days, leap four feet, and squeeze through holes as small as a quarter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tImpressive though they may be, the city has been hard at work trying to reduce their numbers. Then-mayor Eric Adams put in place Kathleen Corradi as an official \u201crat czar\u201d in 2023; she promised that New Yorkers would see \u201ca lot of me and a lot less rats.\u201d When she bailed on the gig in 2025, the Guardian <\/em>tartly headlined the story \u201cRodents prevail in rat race.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\tNo More Rat Czar, But Fewer Rats All the Same\t<\/h2>\n

\n\tThe current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has revealed no plans to anoint a successor to Corradi, but the second part of her prediction has come true: the city has been hard at work getting more of its businesses and residential buildings to set out their trash for collection at specified times and in sealed containers, depriving rodents of the open-air buffets they have long enjoyed as trash bags wait on sidewalks to be hauled away. As a result, reported rat sightings have fallen for 18 months straight. So Raza is cultivating an increasingly smaller audience of animals.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs we ambled along Hester Street between sites, Raza said that with this project, he wanted to ask what it means to experience an artwork, which for him is an ambivalent or ambiguous experience. Raza quoted Immanuel Kant\u2019s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment<\/em> as an inspiration: The philosopher discusses art as having \u201cpurposiveness without purpose,\u201d leading Raza to ask, \u201cHow can we produce something that for them feels strangely like it\u2019s intended for them but doesn\u2019t have any purpose? I don\u2019t want it to just be pieces that rats love, like a water slide for rats. They have to be slightly enigmatic for the rats too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn a weird way,\u201d he said, \u201cthis is the show.\u201d What will be on view in the gallery, he noted, will be more along the lines of documentation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMany New Yorkers profess a love-hate relationship with their city, but getting to know a bit more about the town\u2019s most reviled residents, perhaps seeing it through their eyes, has only increased the artist\u2019s affection for it. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s making me fall in love with New York again,\u201d he said, \u201cthe way I did when I first came here when I was like 19 years old from Buffalo, and I was like, this city is so magical and so cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn a nondescript street under the Manhattan Bridge, near graffiti-marred walls, as smells of trash and rat urine perfumed the air and subway trains thundered deafeningly by overhead, Raza looked around with evident satisfaction. \u201cI just love this area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asad Raza, \u201cThigmotaxis (the rat show)\u201d will be on view at Times, 151 Lafayette St. 4th floor, New York, September 19\u2013December 12, 2026.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/asad-raza-public-art-new-york-rats-times-1234795076\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/003_260812_Asad-Raza-Thigmotaxis-the-rat-show-Photo-Christopher-Garcia-Valle-ARTnews.jpg?w=1024″] One hot August afternoon on New York\u2019s Lower East Side, artist Asad Raza led this reporter through his new, unconventional public art show. Without him, you and I certainly would never have noticed it, but then it\u2019s not really for us. \u201cI\u2019ve made a lot of works for people, trying to create […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2104037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2104037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2104037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2104037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2104037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}