The video installation and performance project Soft Signals links the two UNESCO Creative Cities of Media Arts, Karlsruhe and Tbilisi. Karolina Sobel, Natia Chikvaidze and Davit Khorbaladze took the Georgian painter Elene Akhvlediani (1901–1975) as its starting point; they combine archival fragments, movement, and local knowledge to make absence, erasure, and the disappearance of stories perceptible. The project moves through questions of queer-feminist visibility, archival absence, and the historical conditions of silencing – dwelling on how stories fade, fracture, or remain unspoken.
The performance Elene’s Lines of Flight (Premiere on 01.08. as part of KAMUNA at the ZKM Media Theater) combines dance, text, and live music, moving between two periods of Akhvlediani’s life: her early years in Paris, when her painting practice focused on nudes, and the landscapes that defined her life and identity during the Soviet period. It imagines what the silences in her biography might hold, following rumours and archival omissions rather than official narratives. The title Elene’s Lines of Flight refers to a concept by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that describes a movement away from fixed structures, toward contradiction, multiplicity, and imagination.
The video installation does not reconstruct Akhvlediani’s life, but attends to what lingers at its edges. A visual collage developed through workshops in Tbilisi interweaves local perspectives with archival traces and is combined with the performance documentation. The work unfolds in fragments: gestures, pauses, and quiet images carrying traces of emotional and political temporalities. Through a queer-feminist lens, silence is understood not only as loss, but as a space charged with meaning.
Part of the exhibition Media art is here (2026).
Exhibition dates: 13.08.2026 – 13.09.2026
Location: ZKM Foyer
Supported by the UNESCO City of Media Arts Karlsruhe Project Funding Program for Media Arts 2025.
