The Rice House belongs to one of Laib's most sustained and quietly radical bodies of work. A compressed form of black Indian granite, treated with black smoke and sunflower oil until its surface achieves a near liquid depth, surrounded by a thin field of white rice, a gesture at once archaic and weightless. The rice is not decorative but essential: in Laib's cosmology, drawn from years of study in Indology and Sanskrit, it is an offering, a substance that carries meaning across cultures and millennia. The granite, by contrast, is geological time made material. Together, they constitute a form of dwelling, a house that is also an altar and a threshold. This work was exhibited at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, in September 2007, as part of the solo exhibition Without Time, Without Body, Without Place, from which it was acquired. MoMA holds a white-granite Rice House in its permanent collection. Among the Rice Houses, black granite is the rarest; it appears least often in exhibition records and almost never at auction. The red and orange sandstone versions are the most commonly encountered in museum collections and at auction, with white marble as the most institutionally prominent. The treatment of the surface of the black granite is the most labor intensive of the Rice House’s. Further limiting the number that exist, the black granite was sourced from a single supplier in India.