Inventory of the Week

Artists: Tekla Aslanishvili, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Alia Farid, Migrant Ecologies, Alexandra Pirici, Emilija Škarnulytė, Natasha Tontey, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Bo Wang, Mădălina Zaharia
Curator: Anca Rujoiu
Management and production: Radu Lesevschi
Projection Screen: Atelier Ad Hoc (George Marinescu and Daria Oancea)
AV support: Justin O’Shaugnessy, Marius Costache
Graphic design: Daniel & Andrew
Translations and editing: Sorina Tomulețiu

Screenings schedule

| Wed 10 May

Tekla Aslanishvili – Scenes from Trial and Error (2020, 32 min)

SMART CITY expresses an unconditional trust in the use of technology for the urban future: big data, machine learning, and the internet of things. And while this concept sounds seductively futuristic and its visual renderings, out-of-this-world, the discourse harks back to the twenty-century modern planning and its absolute faith in order and efficiency. Under the leadership of Georgia’s former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the vision of a smart city and a deep seaport held sway and then got indefinitely suspended in Anaklia, a historical fishing town on the southeast coast of the Black Sea. In Tekla Ashlanishvili’s Scenes from Trial and Error, we witness the material traces of this vision encountering in friction the lived reality of the place. A spectacular glass and steel floating building resting on stilts, which was designed for a new city’s town hall that never came into being, the smooth asphalt pavement with impeccable white paint co-existing with the nearby town residents who ride their bikes gently while scattered cattle linger on the road. These multiple forms of existence, temporalities and worldviews are visually and sonically juxtaposed by the artist. Ultimately, we confront the learnings from trial and error: despite the forward-thinking that logistics and infrastructural ambitions project, they are lagging behind life and its unfolding.

Alia Farid – Chibayish (2022, 22 min)

OIL infrastructure and industrial waste exerts long-term effects on the ecological and social fabric of a territory. Chibbayish, a group of marshes in southern Iraq where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet, has been largely impacted by the exploitation of land resources in the form of war and oil extraction. In this borderland region that connects the present-day Irak to Kuwait, Alia Farid follows three young marsh residents: Riad Samir, Jassim and Qassim Mohammed. While herding the buffalo into the water, the youngsters recall the names and locations of other marsh residents, once their neighbours that were forced to leave this area. One of West Asia’s most important biodiversity area, home to more than thirty million date palms and a traditional source of water for the region, the marshland has been weaponised during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war by being drained. This war strategy led to the displacement of Shi’a population, changed birds’ routes and forced buffalo to move to arid land. These transformations of the marshland are highlighted in the film that combines long shots of the marshes with CGI animation of industrial waste. While we follow the buffalo roaming into the water, we hear the buffalo song, a mix of Arabic, low, short guttural sounds, and song. This form of interspecies communication is true to the conditions of this place: people and buffalo, all marsh residents are connected to each other in deep ways of their livelihood.

Biographies

Tekla Aslanishvili (b. Tbilisi, 1988) is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics. Tekla graduated from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts in 2009 and she holds a MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts – the department of Experimental Film and New Media Art. Aslanishvili’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally at Transmediale, Berlin; Tbilisi International Film Festival; Loop Barcelona – Antoni Tàpies museum; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; Neue Berliner Kunstverein; Baltic Triennial; Tbilisi Architecture Biennial; Videonale 18; Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Kunsthalle Münster, EMAF – European Media Art Festival. She is a 2018–2019 Digital Earth fellow, the nominee for Ars-Viva Art prize 2021 and the recipient of the Han Nefkens Foundation – Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Award.

Alia Farid is a filmmaker and sculptor whose practice centres on lesser-known histories that are often deliberately erased. She lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. This year, she was the recipient of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter’s Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2022); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAMSTL), St. Louis (2022); Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2022); and Portikus, Frankfurt (2019). Recent group shows include participation in the Whitney Biennial (2022), Lahore Biennale (2020), Yokohama Triennale (2020), Gwangju Biennale (2019), Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2001 at MoMA PS1 (2019, Sharjah Biennial (2019), and the Bienal de São Paulo (2016). She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto and Chisenhale Gallery in London, both in 2023.

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Anca Rujoiu (b.1984, Bucharest) is a curator and editor. She is part of the curatorial team for the 2024 edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennial. In 2019, she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara. This edition proposed the methodology of encounters as an organising principle rather than an overarching theme. As curator of exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–18), she was a member of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, contributing to the Centre’s first exhibitions, public programs and publishing projects. As part of the curatorial initiative, FormContent in London, she worked on a nomadic project, It’s Moving from I to It (2011-13) that took the format of a script comprised of seventeen “scenes”: exhibitions, workshops, commissioned texts, and the like.

Organised by
Solitude Project in partnership with The National Center for Dance Bucharest

Co-financed by
Administration of the National Cultural Fund
The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The Administration of the National Cultural Fund is not responsible for the content of the project or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.