Land gained, language lost. Territory taken, truth manipulated. The ever-evolving state of war extends past frontlines rendering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine far more than a fight for land. When invasion hits, lives, storytelling, language, history and the cultural backbone of independent nations are all at stake. And just as you fight artillery with more artillery, so too do you fight a culture war with more culture. At least, this is the mission and approach for Tbilisi Culture Week.
Sofia Tchkonia is one of the founding organisers and a philanthropist dedicated to bringing Georgian creativity to the world stage. In the past, she has successfully launched art foundations and events like Tbilisi Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. For the inaugural Tbilisi Culture Week she has partnered with Ukrainian curator, Serge Kerbitskiy, who says that when they started conceptualising the event: “There was no choice left. When the war started, the first [thing] that came to the mind of every Ukrainian was how [we could] help our country and what will be our role in this fight…”
At this event, artistic resistance is hosted at The Factory, an old Coca Cola plant often found at the centre of the city’s modern creative scene. Tbilisi Culture Week celebrates Ukraine and Georgia’s friendship and bond as two independent nations opposed to Russian ideologies and imperialism. Since it’s internationally recognised that 20% of Georgia is currently occupied by Russia, both countries are acutely aware of what’s at stake. Serge says, “If Russians defeat us on the battlefield, they’ll defeat our cultural identity within 10-15 years and officially, [the] Ukrainian language will be simplified to the level of [a] Russian dialect…”
Photos by Rezi Kenia and Andro Asadchev.
IDENTITY
The concept of identity was woven throughout several of the week’s exhibitions and the opening night’s performances brought this to the fore with musical acts that simultaneously celebrated individual national identities and shared pain. Nino Katamadze is a celebrated Georgian jazz singer, recognised as one of the country’s Outstanding Cultural Figures. Meanwhile Katya Chilly is a Ukrainian performer, ethnographer and folklorist known for melding Ukrainian folk with modern arrangements. Backed by the Georgian Philharmonic Orchestra and Nikoloz Rachveli – principal conductor and Goodwill ambassador for UNICEF – Nino’s ethereal melancholia sturred the performance hall. Likewise Chilly, dressed in a traditional Ukrainian Vyshyvanka dress, had the audience entranced with her powerful and haunting voice, before Nino joined her for an emotive and iconic duet performance.
Photo by Giorgi Dadiani.
LOSS AND HOPE
Where some exhibitions highlighted the protection of identity, others expressed the physical and existential trauma of war. Roman Mikhaylov’s residency at The Factory expressed what the artist from Kharkhiv saw and experienced on his visits to Eastern Ukraine where bombs destroyed crops and fields. Mikhaylov has been exploring the trauma of war, as a subject, since 2014. Serge says that his approach “is not about romanticising trauma, but about expressing himself throughout this period of time” Two giant scrolls of parchment are strung from the roof. They are burned, hefty and delicate reams of paper with singed edges and two crumbling holes in the middle. Serge explains, “The burnt paper are scars on the soul. No two are alike and are an expression and symbol of post-traumatic stress disorder.” On the opposite wall, abstract canvases depicting explosions of earth hung high on the walls, while a round patch of burnt Ukrainian grass lay on the ground. The top layer was charred, but the underneath showed evidence of new growth -– a symbol of hope.
Photo by Giorgi Dadiani.
The concepts of loss, hope and spirituality were also explored in Simon Machabeli’s multidisciplinary installation. The Georgian artist presented his work through frescoes, illustrations, collage and film within a concrete room of The Factory that, upon entry, felt like a sacred place of worship. Wide ribbons of black tulle hung from the entrance. Machabeli says they “are reminiscent of Victorian mourning aesthetics, mixed with the Caucasian tradition of widows hanging their black mourning veils on the gates of graveyards to commemorate loved ones’ souls.” Within the concrete walls are 33 drawings depicting nobility and religious iconography. The room was a reflection on the darkness of the current political landscape and served as a meditation on transfiguration. That is, “the moment when heroes who give their lives for homeland are transfigured into spiritual dimension or knowledge,” says Machabeli.
PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY
In states of conflict, art has the power to build empathy by transporting people out of the ‘self’ and into collective experience. The emotion behind creativity can nurture a type of understanding that lectures, articles and news pieces fail to communicate. Giorgi Makkari Gogoladze’s sound installation, ‘Points of Sensibility’, took exhibition-goers out of the Tbilisi Factory and onto the streets of Ukraine. HIs sculpture featured two suspended metal plates transmitting an audio signal, in real time, from central streets in Kyiv where microphones were installed 25 metres above ground transmitting the sounds of the city. To stand underneath the sculpture was to hear the ambient streetscapes from Kyiv, but reaching up to touch the plates delivered the vibrations of the place. The installation, at some level, transported the listener from a place of safety to turmoil.
The Georgian sound engineer said that the inspiration for his work came from a sense of deep empathy and compassion for what Ukraine is enduring. “Those people from peaceful countries, through hearing and touching [from] a safe area, have an opportunity to feel vibrations which come from the country suffering the war. Through this, they have become a part of it … and [feel] compassion which is important and crucial for those who have been, or are suffering the war. These vibrations contain a lot of feelings: fear, pain, happiness, hope.”
PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY
Meanwhile those who live through the throws of war are well acquainted with the stories, news articles, propaganda and search for truth hidden beneath it all. Lia Bagrationi is a Georgian artist who says “I model what I have experienced or lived through, or what my current feelings correlate and connect with.” To date, she’s experienced the pressure of the Soviet system, Georgia’s fight for national independence and liberation, economic collapse and Russian invasion in 1992 and 2008. At Tbilisi Culture Week, truth and the perception of reality lie at the centre of her work. Her installation, Babylon, was a construction of dry, unfired bricks sat beneath a water reservoir that slowly dripped water onto the sculpture. The design was loosely modelled on the architecture of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, as Tbilisi Culture Week unfolded, drip by drip, the sculpture disintegrated until it returned to its original substance from which new energy can be created. Where there are ruins, there’s an opportunity to rebuild.
Identity, memory, truth, and the individual versus the collective experience are intangible. But, as Tbilisi Culture Week demonstrated, not only should they be questioned or protected, but they are fundamental traits of human experience that galvanise us. As Serge says it, “art and imagination seem last in the line during war and we don’t see the immediate results of its existence. But without imagination and creativity, humans become robots [as we see] in many totalitarian countries.”