The world's longest continuously running laboratory experiment, the pitch drop experiment, is a long-term experiment that measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. "Pitch", most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very low rate, taking several years to form a single drop. Bitumen, one of the Earth’s oldest sacred substances, seeps upward in black murmurs from beneath the crust.

In ancient Mesopotamia, these outflows were thought to be the breath of underworld spirits, the rumbling voices of Hārut and Mārut, celestial beings cast down for teaching humans forbidden arts: magic, intoxication, and fiction. Suspended below the surface, they whisper still, Hārut and Mārut’s teachings buried within the mineral archive of the Earth. A thick, low, almost geological murmur rises from below, and Andrius Arutiunian descends into the sonorous layer of the earth to echo the voices of subterraneans. Through sculpture and sound, the exhibition studies the mythic, petrochemical, and magical dimensions of this material, reimagining ancient underworld cosmologies within the infrastructures of contemporary
Extractivism.

Drawing on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, the exhibition approaches oil and its derivatives as sentient, insurgent matter. Petroleum becomes both archive and oracle. Bitumen here is not inert matter but a viscous speaking body. In this subterranean narrative, bitumen snakes echo the Kitāb al-Diryāq (Book of Theriac) Medieval Arabic manuscripts on poisons and antidotes whose illustrated pages sought to visualize the thresholds between toxicity and cure,body and spell. The exhibition’s materials thus oscillate between pharmakon and fossil, between sound and sediment, between language and the untranslatable murmur of the Earth.

The result is an entangled cosmology of oil, magic, myth, and matter uniting into a speculative archaeology of our moment. Arutiunian’s work invites us to listen differently — to the ground, to its frequencies, to the invisible infrastructures that connect the political and the planetary, the sacred and the toxic. The ones who murmur in the dark are the ones who know.