Soft Signals

The video installation »Soft Signals« developed by Natia Chikvaidze, Davit Khorbaladze and Karolia Sobel is part of a collaborative artistic exchange of the two UNESCO Creative Cities of Media Arts, Karlsruhe and Tbilisi. Taking the Georgian painter Elene Akhvlediani (1901–1975) as its starting point, whose multifaceted life and work resist a single fixed narrative, 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.

Research for »Soft Signals« led to development of a collaborative artistic approach, which focuses on archival fragments, movement, and local knowledge to make absence, erasure, and the disappearance of stories perceptible. The video installation does not reconstruct Akhvlediani's life, but examines what lingers at its edges. A visual collage developed through workshops in Tbilisi interweaves local perspectives with archival traces and is combined with the documentation of the performance »Elene’s Lines of Flight«. 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.

The performance »Elene’s Lines of Flight« takes place on August 1, 2026 at the ZKM’s Media Theater within the framework of KAMUNA. The installation »Soft Signals« is part of the exhibition »Media Art is Here«, which is presented annually by the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of Karlsruhe in public spaces during the Schlosslichtspiele. The ZKM serves as both the exhibition venue and a production partner for the performance.