ANTWERP.- The Geopolitics of Infrastructure brings together artists who consider the power relations of infrastructure in the trans-national geopolitical context. It also considers the possibilities of artistic imagination in conceptualising new and alternative infrastructural models.

Infrastructure is big ideas. It underpins the global circulation of objects, ideas, information and people. More palpably, it finds its purpose in relation to our habitat, facilitating the flows, exchanges and support structures that shape our lives, livelihoods and societies. From our mobile phones to the products and food we buy, the water than runs out of the tap to the train taking us on a journey, it all requires substantial infrastructure, or even multiple networks of infrastructures working in synchronicity. It should come as no surprise then, when something that is normally invisible becomes increasingly all-encompassing, that it becomes hugely topical.

The conquering of time and space—for these frontiers to be “frictionless”—is the goal of infrastructure in order to bring us closer together, to be able to share and distribute quicker, and across greater distances and borders. Infrastructure most visibly facilitates such things as trade, transport, manufacturing, utilities, energy and communication, as well as key facets of the public sphere including health and education as well as the arts. Infrastructure in the contemporary world also incorporates such things as tech and big data, urban planning, automation, the algorithmic management of urban spaces, and vast railway corridors such as China’s reimagining of the historic Silk Road in the form of its Belt and Road Initiative. We should acknowledge that infrastructure also encompasses war and defence systems, and by implication the destruction of other infrastructures. Infrastructure is many things. The classical elements—earth, wind, water, fire—are exploited in a context of overlapping jurisdiction, transnational circulation and rapid urbanisation.

Infrastructure has an unusual status. It is itself both a “thing” and the relation between things. This duality of being simultaneously visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, and just as much about its maintenance as its promise, sees infrastructure as something rather complex, even conceptual, and thus less easily readable. Yet infrastructure is amongst the biggest factors shaping our societies, and often only becomes lucid when things fail. With the distinct ability to read how things happen across space and time, infrastructure can be examined, particularly through technological, economic, logistical, political and social perspectives. Many artists understand the urgency to do so.

This exhibition, titled The Geopolitics of Infrastructure, presents the work of a generation of artists bringing contemporary perspectives to the particular question of infrastructure in the geopolitical context. Artists, through their practice, are thinking trans-nationally. They consider in great detail the political commitments, imagination and power relations of infrastructure. The exhibition presents their examinations of how such structures are utilised to function as proxies of the state.

When we turn on the tap, how many people want to think about what has to happen for the water to reach us, and who might be affected along the way? How does information reach your smartphone? What has to happen for a rare mineral in the ground to become a battery for an electric vehicle? These such questions are the kind that this exhibition seeks to ask. Perhaps also marking the return of geopolitics in contemporary art, such artistic investigations reflect a world grappling with everything from trade wars, fake news, rising gas prices and conflict.

With an awareness that geopolitics also shapes the conditions of practice for artists, the exhibition will present research-driven practices, often with deep socio-political engagement. For this reason, the exhibition also crucially considers the possibilities of artistic imagination in the conceptualisation of new and alternative models of infrastructure.