Porous Grounds: Bringing Sand Research into Conversation with Art and Design
How can sand be made visible, tangible, and experienced beyond its familiar roles as a natural resource or building material? This question is at the heart of Porous Grounds, a collaborative exhibition initiated and developed by the S.AND research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in partnership with KV – Verein für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. Opening on 7 November 2026, the exhibition brings together anthropologists, artists, and designers to explore sand as a material that both shapes and unsettles the worlds we inhabit.
The exhibition grew out of conversations between S.AND researchers and artists whose work engages with sand and other geological matter. Since 2022, the S.AND team, led by Lukas Ley, has been investigating the social, political, and ecological lives of sand along the shores of the Indian Ocean. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Kenya, the researchers trace how sand moves between environments, infrastructures, and everyday lives. Their research asks how sand contributes to the making and unmaking of coastal cities, how it becomes entangled in struggles over land and resources, and how people work with its shifting material properties. Porous Grounds emerged from the group’s interest in exploring these questions through artistic practices and forms of knowledge. Developed in close exchange with KV Leipzig, the exhibition became an opportunity to bring ethnographic perspectives into conversation with artistic experimentation. Co-curated by Lukas Ley and Daniel Ellwanger, it approaches the exhibition space not simply as a place to present research findings, but as a site of inquiry in its own right.
Bringing together works by Jeewi Lee, Lara Almarcegui, field-0 (Jingru ‘Cyan’ Cheng and Chen Zhan), Simone Albers, and the S.AND group members Teresa Cremer, Javed Kaisar, Tarini Monga, and Lukas Ley, the exhibition follows sand across different landscapes and contexts: from open-cast mines and construction sites to eroding shorelines, beaches, laboratories, and museums. Through different materials, methods, and forms of representation, the contributions invite visitors to encounter sand not as passive matter, but as something deeply embedded in social relations, environmental transformations, and everyday practices.
Throughout the development of Porous Grounds, the S.AND team has contributed ethnographic perspectives, fieldwork materials, and conceptual questions, while engaging in an ongoing dialogue with the participating artists and designers. Rather than translating anthropological knowledge into artistic form, the collaboration seeks to explore what different ways of researching, sensing, and working with sand can reveal together. For S.AND, the exhibition is therefore also an experiment in collaborative knowledge production. By moving between field research and the exhibition space, Porous Grounds opens up new possibilities for communicating anthropological research and engaging wider audiences in questions of materiality, environmental change, and social life.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public program of talks, film screenings, and other events. All events are free of charge, and exhibition texts are available in German, English, and Easy-to-Read German.
Exhibition duration: 8 November – 19 December 2026
Venue: KV – Verein für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Kolonnadenstraße 6, 04109 Leipzig
Co-curated by Daniel Ellwanger and Lukas Ley
The exhibition is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Cultural Office of Leipzig, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, the Mondriaan Fund, the City of Leipzig, and the Leipzig Foundation. For opening hours, accessibility information, and the accompanying program, visit KV Leipzig.
(https://kunstverein-leipzig.org/actions/porous-grounds-opening)