The Geopolitics of Infrastructure brings together a generation of artists exploring the deep entanglements between infrastructure and power. From the visible to the invisible, the tangible to the conceptual, the exhibition highlights how infrastructure not only shapes our world but also symbolises ambition, influence, and control on a global scale.
Infrastructure facilitates the flow of goods, ideas, people, and resources—structuring how we live, connect, and build societies. It spans trade routes and digital networks, energy grids and education systems, public health and cultural institutions. It is both a material reality and a symbolic force.
At the same time, infrastructure embodies future possibilities and risks. It includes data-driven cities, automation, renewable energy systems, and global megaprojects like the Belt & Road Initiative. But infrastructure is also weaponised in war, vulnerable to collapse, and implicated in displacement and ecological degradation. Its vast scale often conceals its political and social implications, yet its impact is immediate and long-lasting.
In a rapidly transforming world, infrastructure operates across borders—shaping economies, environments, and geopolitics. Its presence is often felt more than seen, and its complexity resists easy interpretation. But it is precisely this opacity that artists in the exhibition seek to make visible. Their practices reveal how infrastructure organises life and labor, dictates access and exclusion, and influences how power is exercised.
The Geopolitics of Infrastructure offers critical, research-based artistic perspectives on these systems and their effects. The exhibition looks at infrastructure as a field of struggle and imagination: one that reflects political ideologies, national agendas, and economic dependencies, but also invites alternative visions. Many of the participating artists engage with infrastructure as both subject and context—acknowledging that the very conditions of artistic production are themselves shaped by geopolitical forces.
By reimagining the role of infrastructure beyond its functional purpose, the exhibition asks: What futures can we build? What models can we rethink or undo? And how can artistic practices help us perceive—and perhaps reconfigure—the hidden logics of power embedded in infrastructure?
Curated by Nav Haq.
Artists: Tekla Aslanishvili, Mirwan Andan & Iswanto Hartono, Winnie Claessens, Köken Ergun & Fetra Danu, Köken Ergun & Tashi Lama, Assem Hendawi, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Pejvak, Shahana Rajani, Sojung Jun, The Question of Funding, Jonas Staal and Zheng Mahler.
Exhibition architecture by Studio PARA~
