Infrastructure is geopolitics, even when invisible — as told by an exhibition in Antwerp

Closely tied to everyday life, crossing on a global scale the stories of the products we consume, the phones we use, the roads we travel, infrastructures are both something tangible – railway networks, aquifers – and the relationship between different things.

It is precisely flows, exchanges, and support structures shaping our daily lives that are at the core of “The Geopolitics of Infrastructure. Contemporary Perspectives”, a group exhibition hosted at M HKA in Antwerp (until September 21). The exhibition design, by Studio Para, unfolds across inclined surfaces that give space to the works – experimental documentaries, paintings, and holograms – by thirteen artists from Belgium, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Palestine, and Turkey. 

What forms can infrastructures take, and what stories about them can be made visible?

Whether public, private, or a combination of both, infrastructural projects are symbols of modernization, influence, and power among international partners. This complexity makes them visible and invisible, concrete and abstract; they outline diplomatic exchanges, strategic cooperation, and sometimes tensions. A telling example is China’s Belt and Road Initiative: an ambitious infrastructure plan that reinterprets the ancient Silk Road with strong economic and geopolitical implications.

Shahana Rajani’s video installation Four Acts of Recovery poetically explores the engineering interventions on water landscapes begun in late 19th-century colonial India, which led to massive environmental imbalance in Pakistan. We see a family of fishermen drawing a map on a large mural painted in Ibrahim Hyderi, a district of Karachi where many fishing communities displaced from the Indus delta now live due to the environmental collapse caused by water infrastructures.

Unlike the colonial approach, where maps delineate borders and territories, the communal practice of painting landscapes is a sacred ritual rooted in the ancient Islamic tradition of talismanic drawing. Alongside the video, Rajani also presents paintings of coastal landscapes created within the Karachi LaJamia collective, which she co-directs to protect aquatic ecosystems.

Equally attentive to the consequences of infrastructures is Georgian artist and filmmaker Tekla Aslanishvili. Her essay-film A State in a State retraces the unfinished construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, designed to connect Europe and Asia as part of the New Silk Road’s Middle Corridor. While conceived to unite territories, goods, and people, railway infrastructures can also become tools of exclusion, as shown by this project linking Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey while marginalizing Armenia.

Yet, workers and residents across the countries touched by the incomplete network manage to build solidarities beyond national borders. The films by Rajani and Aslanishvili are co-produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation in Barcelona, which has long supported audiovisual production by artists based in Asia.

Turkish artist Köken Ergun also reflects on the geopolitical dynamics of China’s Belt and Road Initiative with a series of paintings about Nepal’s 2017 agreement with China to build the Tamor hydropower dam, the Kerung-Kathmandu railway, and the semi-underground Phukot Karnali hydropower plant. The paintings highlight both the benefits and the potential challenges of these projects in terms of human and environmental impact. Complementing them, two short videos imagine how these infrastructures might shape Nepal’s future relations with its two powerful neighbors: China and India.

It is along the Maritime Silk Road that Ergun’s animated film China, Beijing, I Love You!, created with Fetra Danu, unfolds. The route extends from Sulawesi Island in Indonesia – where nickel is mined – across the Strait of Malacca and several Indian Ocean ports, where cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo also passes, before reaching Europe through the Suez Canal. The protagonists of the film are Nickel Dust and Cobalt Dust – exiled particles of nickel and cobalt from Sulawesi and Congo – who demand to be returned to their lands and not exploited in the global production of batteries for electric vehicles and smartphones.

Infrastructure can also cross time: this is the focus of the installation by Mirwan Andan & Iswanto Hartono, which brings to light the history of the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), held in Jakarta in 1963 with the participation of 51 states from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. The “intangible” network of GANEFO remains alive in Indonesian society today, in the names of people, places, and streets, more than sixty years later. Winnie Claessens’ installation Future Archaeology also engages with time, specifically that of geostationary infrastructures and the classification of abandoned satellites, considered “space debris” floating endlessly. Hard to visualize, yet crucial to communication networks.

Present and future scenarios: these are what most of the works at M HKA explore, creating dialogues between geography, history, and economy. Different artistic languages investigate how global transformations are influencing the histories of individual countries, exposing strategic economic interests and their political, social, and environmental consequences.

Opening image: Shahana Rajani, Four Acts of Recovery, video still, 2025. Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation. Courtesy the artist