Tekla Aslanishvili: The Mountain Speaks to the Sea

The Mountain Speaks to the Sea is the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands of Georgian filmmaker and artist Tekla Aslanishvili. The exhibition brings together Aslanishvili’s interdisciplinary and collaborative body of work, which looks into the multifaceted regimes of infrastructural governance, examining how ports, railways, and smart city projects act as technologies of citizenship and sovereignty.

Aslanishvili’s experimental documentary films Scenes from Trial and Error (2020) and A State in a State (2022) blend intimate stories and geopolitical narratives in the Caucasus and Caspian regions with macro-infrastructural transformations. The films go against the grain in their reading of the grand promises of connectivity, challenging the dominant vision of the new Silk Road. While disclosing the intricate geopolitical networks and the extractive operation behind the making of infrastructure, they observe the social fabric woven along the transit routes, excavating their potential for building lasting, transnational kinship among the people who live and work around them.

Through a dynamic moving-image landscape designed by architect Natalia Nebieridze, the exhibition presents Aslanishvili’s new cinematic project The Mountain Speaks to the Sea (2024), that reassembles fragmented (hi)stories of restructuring labor and life around the realm of global energy politics. The experimental two-channel documentary, developed in collaboration with Alexandra Aroshvili, one of the founders of the “Fair Energy Politics Collective”,  follows the rivers of the South Caucasus, tracing their paths from the mountains to the Black Sea, mapping the material and social infrastructures surrounding them through the shifting seasons. The focus culminates in the joint EU-Georgia initiative to construct the world’s longest high-voltage power grid under the Black Sea, aimed at reducing the EU’s dependency on Russia for global data and energy transmission. By intertwining personal and distant histories with myths and future orientations, the film examines how energy infrastructures are reforming not only the social and geological landscapes but also the making and unmaking of state borders and the practices of statecraft.

Tekla Aslanishvili. The Mountain Speaks to the Sea is curated by Silvia Franceschini and is the first exhibition in the program Systems and Territories. The program focuses on exhibitions arising from long-term investigations and collaborations between artists, researchers, and communities. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication exploring the history and potentiality of moving images in the making and unmaking of infrastructures. Positioned between an artist’s book and a reader, the volume features contributions from writers and scholars in visual culture, political science and critical geography, such as Alexandra Aroshvili, Ifor Duncan, Evelina Gambino, and Timothy Mitchell.

Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Currently, Aslanishvili is a postgraduate fellow at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (BAS) at Berlin University of the Arts. She completed her bachelors at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2009 and holds an MA in Experimental Film and New Media from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Berlinische Galerie; SculptureCenter, New York; Taipei Biennial 2023; Wiels, Brussels; Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Transmediale 2023, Berlin; LOOP Festival—Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Neue Berliner Kunstverein; 14th Baltic Triennial; Tbilisi Architecture Biennial; Short Film Festival Oberhausen; and Kunsthalle Münster. She was a Digital Earth Fellow (2019), a nominee for the Ars-Viva Art Prize (2021), and a recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation—Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award (2020).

Partnerships
The project is supported by the Italian Council program (2024) promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, Critical Media Lab HGK Basel FHNW, University of Arts Berlin, Graduate School UdK Berlin, Kommission für künstlerische und wissenschaftliche Vorhaben (KKWV) Berlin, E.A. Shared Space Tbilisi, Cultuur Eindhoven and Mondriaan Fonds.

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