On 6 September, at 16.00, the programme of the 1st Klaipėda Biennial will continue at the Arlekinas cinema (Bangų g. 5A, Klaipėda) with a screening of the artist Tekla Aslanishvili’s The Mountain Speaks to the Sea (2024, duration – 58 min. 53 sec.) and a conversation with the artist at 17.00 – 17.45.
Tekla Aslanishvili’s work explores infrastructure projects – ports, railways, smart cities – as technologies of citizenship and sovereignty, and examines their relationship to them. “The Mountain Talks to the Sea is a trilogy of films revealing the costs and impacts of infrastructure in the South Caucasus, from the mountains to the Black Sea. It also looks at initiatives such as the European Union’s project to build a high-voltage power line under the Black Sea.
Infrastructure becomes a medium for the artist to reflect not only on technological processes, but also on industrial breakdowns, the distribution of power between governments, communities and natural landscapes. She focuses on south-west Georgia, a region where unchecked cryptocurrency mining unbalances energy systems and disrupts social ties, and where dams disturb the
ecological balance. These structures reveal the invisible, contested realities that come with the transformation of land infrastructure.
In the work on show, the relationship between infrastructure and landscape echoes the broader ecological and identity issues inherent in maritime transit.
Tekla Aslanishvili (b. 1988) is an essayist and filmmaker living and working in Berlin, Vienna and Tbilisi. Her work has been exhibited at international museums and art festivals such as M HKA, Transmediale, SculptureCenter, Taipei Biennale and the Baltic Triennial. Aslanishvili is currently an IFK Fellow, a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a member of the Graduate School of the Berlin University of the Arts.
