What a Mountain Holds: Aşît + Tellurian Drama
Film screening, with curators’ introduction
Films by Pinar Ögrenci and Riar Rizaldi
Curated by Marianna Tsionki and Mariana Cunha
The event is part of the exhibition Liminal Ecologies: Thresholds of Transition and Entanglement
7 pm, tranzitsk, Beskydská 12, Bratislava
The event will be held in English.
What a Mountain Holds presents two artists’ films reflecting on the mountain as a conflicting site of historical rupture and ecological shifts. Aşît (Avalanche) unfolds in the mountainous region in southern Van, on Turkey’s border with Iran, while Tellurian Drama is set on the Malabar Mountain range in West Java, Indonesia. In both, imperial powers have displaced populations and torn communities through violent colonial occupation. Through foregrounding the mountains’ topographical features, the films meditate on the political and ecological significance of these landscapes as geographies that not only shape the fate of their dwellers but also as spaces of emancipatory imaginations. As a confluence of human and more-than-human ontologies, the mountain is revealed as dwelling of ancestral, ghostly entities, thus becoming a site where the material and the mythical converge. The programme highlights the personal stories and contested histories held within the geological strata of mountains, crossing the steep slopes of histories, ecologies and temporalities.
Aşît, dir. Pınar Öğrenci, 2022, 60 mins
Filmed in Müküs, Öğrenci’s late father’s hometown in the mountainous east of Turkey, Aşît traces histories of the Armenian genocide and the Turkish war on the Kurds through a landscape shaped by forced displacement, environmental violence, and military occupation. Referencing Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle, the film weaves memory, literature, and mourning into a poetic essay on loss, migration, and cultural erasure.
Tellurian Drama, dir. Riar Rizaldi, 2020, 26 mins
Tellurian Drama explores the spectral afterlife of Radio Malabar, a colonial-era transmission station in West Java. Blending archival research and speculative fiction, the film examines the mountain as a historical agent, colonial ruins as techno-political infrastructure, and indigenous cosmologies as enduring counterforces. The film reveals how landscapes absorb conflicting histories, where mechanical rhythms overwrite celestial ones, and ruins echo unrealised futures.
●︎ Pinar Öğrenci is an artist living in Berlin. She has a background in architecture, which informs her films and installations that accumulate traces of material culture related to forced displacement. Öğrenci engages with place, site and architecture as the materialisation of violence. Her practice serves as a response to a collective past often left in silence, urging her audience to imagine a future built on justice, equality, and collective healing. By delving into local archives, she initiates a process of collaborative memory, engaging communities in questioning what has been remembered, erased, or overlooked. Her works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, Harvard Museum, documenta fifteen, Gwangju Biennial and many other institutions.
●︎ Riar Rizaldi works as an artist and filmmaker. His artistic practice focuses mostly on the relationship between science, technology, labour, and nature, worldviews, genre cinema, and the possibility of theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at various film festivals (including Berlinale, Locarno, IFFR, etc.) as well as MoMA, Whitney Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennale, and other venues and institutions. Recent solo exhibitions and focus programs of his works have been held at Gasworks London (2024), ICA London (2024), Z33 Hasselt (2024), Centre de la photographie Genève (2023), and Batalha Centro de Cinema Porto (2023), amongst others.
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ERSTE Foundation is main partner of tranzit.
Kindly supported by Leeds Arts University and CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media), University of Westminster
Media partners: Artalk.info, Flash Art CZ & SK, Kapitál, GoOut.net
