Georgian Pavilion at the 52 Venice Biennale

The Georgian pavilion at the 52nd International Art Exhibition in Venice presents projects and works which appear largely different from each other. It is not only artistic taste and world outlook that distinguishes the featured artists, but also a range of modern and traditional means and media they use in their works. The art of Georgia has always been remarkable for its diversity and originality. Rooted in local traditions, Georgian art has also benefited at different times from foreign styles and movements. Contemporary Georgian art is trying to establish itself on the world map of art. The Georgian artistic community has certainly become much more ‘open’ than it had been in previous decades. Analysis of the past, revision of values, search for and adoption of new forms and media, frequent instances of blind imitation, along with the desire to maintain local values, traditions and aesthetics and build contemporary art on these premises are evident. Contemporary artists respond differently to the social, political and cultural processes unfolding in their country. The works represented at the exhibition are reflective only as part of the creative processes taking place in contemporary Georgian art.

Eteri Chkadua has been living in the US since 1980, when she left Georgia. The artist remains faithful to traditional artistic means, painting her medium and large realistic figures on canvas by using brush and paints in a manner which largely relies on the experience of a generation of earlier artists and which was taught to her at the Georgian Academy of Fine Arts. Eteri Chkadua creates a hybrid of New-York, Jamaican, Miami and Georgian impressions. She portrays a woman’s world as seen by a woman – a multi-layered form with a polished surface beyond which one can read impulsiveness almost bordering with the primitive state. Hallucinatory perception echoes her emotions and impulses.
‘My image of a woman is simultaneously characterized by ethnical, pop-art, tourism and emigrant related elements. It has become universal as I made geography and time vanish’.

The RE-TURN project by Tamara Kvesitadze (co-authors Paata Sanaia and Zura Gugulashvili) is composed of one installation and several mechanical figures. The materials used are fiberglass, metal and mechanisms. The mechanical figures represent the process of transformation in movement, which finds reflection on the surroundings they are placed in. The concept of the work is based on the correlation between the mechanical and organic.
‘Mechanical vs. organic. Organic nature of the mechanical → orderliness of the organic → mechanical nature of the orderliness’.

Sophia Tabatadze portrays the state of a human being with the use of architectural forms. Her interpretation of architecture goes beyond the primary meaning of the word. In her project titled Humancon Undercon, Tabatadze shows human traces in an urban environment that has become thoroughly inhuman. To underline this imbalance, she emphasizes certain details, leaving others uncompleted. She aims to show our inability to perceive things in their totality - a totality that includes space and time. It is this inability that lies behind our present condition of constant amnesia, in which we choose to overlook certain aspects of our collective past.
‘My work draws on the urban environment and the things that happen in it. In order to bring these happenings close to myself I process them through my own body by physically making work about it. By doing so I try to accept my surroundings in the period when their aesthetics and directions do not match with mine’.