The Geopolitics of Infrastructure. Contemporary Perspectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) in Belgium interrogates infrastructure and its often unexamined effects on the world, ranging from tangible structures to ideas of progress with powerful ramifications on political imagination. The group show features a diverse array of artists from different countries, working across various mediums, including video, kinetic sculpture, augmented reality and multimedia installations. Curator Nav Haq, the museum's associate director, said to STIR, “Politics is enchanted by the promise of infrastructure and what it can bring for the future. Infrastructure is about power, transformation and aspiration and for better or for worse, this is intoxicating.”

All the component parts…have been really important in providing a forum for like-minded artists. It is not just an exhibition in that sense but really a sort of critical mass and the building blocks to long-term engagements. – Nav Haq

The exhibition is a space to examine how infrastructure shapes society on a local to transnational scale, even as it largely remains outside of mainstream cultural consciousness—an ironic result of its ubiquity. It was augmented by a research summit from June 14 - 21, 2025—Archipelago of Artistic Practices—co-organised with the Jubilee Platform for Artistic Research in Brussels. “All the component parts…have been really important in providing a forum for like-minded artists. It is not just an exhibition in that sense but really a sort of critical mass and the building blocks to long-term engagements,” said Haq.

The exhibition treats infrastructure as a liminal concept — referring both to objects and the space and connectivity between objects. Its purpose, according to Haq, is to eliminate friction between elements—countries, ports and even time and space. Turkish artist Köken Ergun focuses on China's Belt and Road Initiative, considered a modern recreation of the Silk Road, and its hidden costs, in the documentary, China, Beijing, I Love You! (2023), created collaboratively with Indonesian animation artist, Fetra Danu, with support from researchers across the globe. Pakistani artist Shahana Rajani’s video installation, Four Acts of Recovery (2025), employs the same format to follow a family of fisherfolk displaced from the Indus Delta as a result of environmental collapse caused by large water infrastructure. The film shows the family turning to drawing and painting landscapes, contrasting this healing communal practice with colonial mapmaking and the disastrous results of waterscape engineering (like the construction of large artificial dams and pipelines) beginning in the 19th century.

Many of the exhibition’s installations use video as their medium, often in the form of an experimental or critical documentary. Haq explained, “I think this is because the research often requires a lot of fieldwork and the moving image can capture the experience, the discoveries and the human and environmental impact. A time-based medium like video can make a lot of sense when a lot of explanation is required.” Egyptian artist Assem Hendawi presents Everything Under Heaven (2021), a 17-minute film that unravels how infrastructure projects following Egypt’s revolution in 1952 shaped its statehood and made it vulnerable to foreign influence and financial speculation.

Belgian artist Winnie Claessens explores similar themes—infrastructure, modern manifestations of colonialism and connectivity—with the solar system as his setting. In video art like The Cosmic Dance / The Planetary Parade (2024) and sculptures like Future Archeology – Scarpa (2024), Claessens casts space as the latest frontier for the competing ideologies, technologies and aspirations of nations. Russian-born Canadian artist Felix Kalmenson and Iranian artist Rouzbeh Akhbari form the research-based collaborative artist collective, Pejvak (meaning ‘echo’ in Farsi). In this installation, they zero in on the 20th-century ‘space race’ between the United States and the Soviet Union. Their video of the performance, Shokouk — A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts (2022), is a fantastical assemblage of fact and fiction tracing the absurd and seismic events of the time and their political and ecological fallout.

Other installations draw their inspiration from historical events and political movements, unearthing narratives that are as unfamiliar as their fictional counterparts. Indonesian artists Mirwan Andan and Iswanto Hartono sift through the remnants of the many experimental transformations that took place in post-Independence Indonesia, landing on ‘GANEFO’. The Games of the New Emerging Forces were created as an alternative Olympics for emerging nations by the first President of Indonesia, to oppose the imperial power of the West. Although the games only took place in 1963 and 1966, the artists use field research—visual artefacts, anthems, emblematic artworks, video footage and interviews—to highlight the event’s now-forgotten infrastructure and mission through contemporary art.

Some artists turn to more experimental mediums to render abstract concepts visible, such as Congolese contemporary artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi. His practice is that of a polymath—inspired by technology, science, math, developmental economics, mythology and visual art. His works, like the kinetic sculpture Trotation (1992–2011), instrumentalise engineering to illustrate complex sociocultural concepts like the inequality between the Global North and Global South through a model of the Earth’s field of rotation and revolution. Mukendi imagines a third axis to metaphorically and physically neutralise the greater revolution felt by those near the equator. South Korean artist Sojung Jun reflects the antagonism between tradition and modernity through video, sculpture and augmented reality. Syncope (2023) is a self-referential, non-linear meditation on the speed of culture, nature and technology. The video is shown through an augmented reality application, which allows users to interact with their environment by spreading 'digital seeds'. She also translates this into a physical sculpture, Epiphyllum I (2023), creating 3 versions of the artwork, each shifting to conform to the structure of its medium.

The Geopolitics of Infrastructure. Contemporary Perspectives is as international and multivalent as its subject. By resisting the impulse to merely retell history or prescribe changes, the exhibition offers a free space to analyse, consider and reimagine the place of infrastructure in society. The artists in the exhibition bring different lenses, lived experiences and expertise to their artworks, making space for syncretic thought and a polyphonic imagination.

‘The Geopolitics of Infrastructure. Contemporary Perspectives’ will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) in Belgium from June 13 – September 21, 2025.