Built Temporality
October 26 - November 3, 2018
Daily open from 11:00-19:00
Exhibition Curators: Sophia Tabatadze (GeoAIR) and Tinatin Gurgenidze (TAB).

The former KGB building (Now Auto Amateur Association), is located in the middle of the Gldani neighborhood and hosted the indoor exhibition of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial (TAB).

Framework of the exhibition:

To be born in Georgia is to have the perpetual feeling that everything you do is in vain or in some way temporary. People carry in their bodies the feeling that war, political unrest, and calamity might happen at any given moment. Everyone orients their life and relation to the future with this feeling of unpredictability and impermanence in mind.

Since Georgian independence in 1991, the country has been marked by a series of violent disruptions: the civil war of the early ‘90s, internal conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and most recently the 2008 war with Russia. While change is a constant, we live with the feeling that we are in a vicious cycle—and the sense that things repeat over and over is ever-present. We have been living in a time and space of transformation ever since. We all have the feeling that we embody this disruptive temporality, and transition has become a permanent state of existence.

Participants:

Onur Ceritoglu; Lado Darakhvelidze; Onno Dirker; Tako Robakidze; Iliauni students and Tinatin Gurgenidze; Salome Jashi, Kote Jincharadze, David Kukhalashvili ; Diana Lucas Drogan; Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs; Ceren Oykut; Salome Sikharulidze, Daniel Spehr, Mikheil Svanidze, Giorgi Tabatadze  

 

Onur Ceritoglu

Removers
Installation

In the Turkish construction sector, removers are the primary collectors who salvage building elements and materials. Collectors who operate their own organization sell their recyclable material to private recycling factories in Turkey and beyond. Ceritoglu followed some of this material—such as plastic window frames, doorbell boxes, etc—from Turkey to Georgia. His installation of windows is made by this very material. The doorbells add an acoustic layer to the installation—with different bell tones (analogue and digital) corresponding to their time of manufacture. While some sound like birdcalls, others might ring with nostalgia for childhood family visits.

 

Lado Darakhvelidze

Mapping Gldani
Drawings developed especially for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial

The project Mapping the Caucasus With You stems from the desire to begin a dialogue between the peoples of the Northern and Southern Caucasus. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and ongoing conflicts in the region thereafter, borders closed and information ceased to circulate in individual regions and between them. Even in the age of the global village, neighboring countries, cities and villages in this part of the world remain disconnected. For Mapping the Caucasus With You, Darakhvelidze approached individuals throughout the Caucasus, collecting their memories of the past several decades. 

Mapping Gldani is especially developed for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. Gldani is home to several for IDP settlements, and the artist approached them in order to collect their memories from their home towns and juxtapose them with their current living conditions in Gldani.

 

Onno Dirker

Grapes in Tbilisi
Photographs

Grapes in Tbilisi is an invitation to walk through Tbilisi and take notice of the vines and grapes all around you. If you start seeing the city as one large vineyard, like Dirker does, you will start thinking of all its associated cultural features, habits, and customs. During his walks through Tbilisi Dirker often wondered: who planted these grapes? Who takes care of them? The fact that he was a foreigner in Georgia made it acceptable that he didn’t know and would ask all kinds of childish questions. He was given explanations together with wine made by these grapes—and people told him a lot more than just stories about grapes on the veranda.

 

Tako Robakidze

Creeping Borders
Photographs

This photographic series is from the multimedia project Creeping Borders, which is a reflection on the Russian Occupation that continues to this day in Georgia. After the war of 2008, more than 20 000 Georgians were displaced and resettled around the country in IDP settlements. And since April 2011, Russians have installed barbed wire, fences, and signs along the occupation line. This so-called borderization process has already directly affected around 200 Georgian families, who were forced to flee their homes thus creating a second wave of IDPs.

One of the photos depicts a small model, made by a refugee from Tskhinvali region, of their former family home. People living in Tskhinvali region used to have two floor houses with eight or nine rooms, with gardens and yards.  Much of this remains just a memory—as most of the IDP’s didn’t bring any photos of their old houses as they thought they would return.

 

Iliauni students and Tinatin Gurgenidze;

A Garage
Wallpaper

Head of the course Tinatin Gurgenidze together with students of Iliauni: Salome Javakhadze, Mariam Maglakelidze, Guram Khmidiashvili, Natia Robakidze, Elene Kharazashvili, Konstantine Tsaava, Lika Shavgulidze, Shota Kenchishvili

The project explores the inner-life of Gldani’s self-built garages, as well as their impact on their urban surroundings. Qualitative research methods including detailed interviews; ethnographic observations and spatial analysis were applied in order to gain information about the different uses, functions and typologies of the garages.

The garages of Gldani functioned as a good example of how the arrangement of objects and actions in space are subjected to social power relations and negotiation processes. Their development frequently experiences alterations that reflect the social, economic and political changes that they are exposed to. As stated by a garage tenant, the garages became a symbol for the unpredictable, non-permanent conditions in which they find themselves.

 

Salome Jashi 

A Swim
Film (12 min)

A Swim is an observational film of monochromatic settlements built in lines and rows. The heat-shimmer exaggerates a sense of immobility while a faded attempt for a breakout lingers. This settlement in Tserovani, which was built for those displaced after the war with Russia in 2008, is a visualization of the system, a social scheme, that exists in Georgia.   

 

Kote Jincharadze

Rodinoba
Performance

“Pounding water” is a Georgian expression that refers to wasting effort. In his performance, Rodinoba, Jincharadze, together with other performers, pounded water with a mortar and pestle. The performance demonstrated the process of doing things without any result, particularly as it relates to one’s capacity to shape the lived space of the city. Governments change but control over the architectural landscape of the country remains the main battle. Many civic initiatives to stop demolition of historical parts of the city, to prevent the cutting of trees and appropriation of the little green landscape left in Tbilisi, has brought few results as top down plans almost always go ahead.

 

David Kukhalashvili

City
Drawings

In the works of David Kukhalashvili we see the urban environment from a wider perspective. Usually we see things from our own point of view—surrounded by our thoughts in our daily routines—but Kukhalashvili multiplies this view and zooms out. This birds-eye view makes one realize that there is a larger grid and larger picture that we operate within, a platform created by someone else, and our existence can at times seem like we are actors in someone’s play. This disturbing realization can make one wonder about the choices that we make: are these really our choices or were we made to believe something for the sake of someone’s political and commercial benefit? While we may routinely have this feeling when we are connected to the net and social media, Kukhalashvili’s works have a similar effect but on a very analogue level. 

 

Diana Lucas-Drogan

Skin of Hellersdorf
Installation

This artistic research project investigates the relationship between actors, residents, initiatives, and students in Hellersdorf, Berlin. The focus of the project is on the appropriation and exclusion of refugees from the city, and the lived environment that results. Hellersforf is a city within a city, comprised solely of tower and block buildings and, in this way, has many similarities with Gldani.

The spaces we inhabit are structured by power dynamics and rules. In this dependency, our body, daily rituals, and the way we navigate urban space, interlink. In her works, Lucas-Drogan re-draws and performs cultural codes through counter-mappings, and reflects on methods of representation in the research field. Lucas-Drogan encourages design thinking and shows examples of representing multiple narratives of space and everyday life through collective mapping.

 

Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs

Travels
Photographs

The photographs by Onorato and Krebs are made during their journeys and serve as the starting point for a series of works— some real, some surreal—in which images of their experiences are joined with those constructed from memory and the imagination. One of these journeys took them to Georgia as well, where they have photographed a space with felled trees.

In other photos, their play with architecture makes the viewer wonder about the perspective one takes while looking at something, and to suggest that maybe what looks like a fixed reality changes when one alters their position.

 

Ceren Oykut 

Topography Man
Drawings on glass, mono-prints and animation developed especially for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial

Ceren Oykut has developed a commissioned work for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial called Topography Man—an experiment aimed at bringing together site-specific installation and animation. The tendency of Topography Man is to produce subconscious stories about "home". Oykut’s themes are often the relation between architecture and the human body, and how these two come together in the built environment.

For the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, Oykut has made drawings directly on the glass windows in the exhibition space. These drawings were her observations of Tbilisi and its inhabitants. As a second step, she photographed these images and animated them. The animation is projected on the same glass windows, where the drawings are. 

 

Salome Sikharulidze

Demolished House
Wallpaper

Upon witnessing the house of her friend being demolished, Sikharulidze saw the well-known and intimate interior of her friend’s room—a space where they used to hang out and share details of one another’s lives—exposed from the outside. This melancholy encounter makes her imagine the fate of inhabitants every time she sees a semi-demolished house. These houses are usually small, older brick-buildings, with the memories of generations stored inside them—and provokes the sense that along with the buildings being erased, so are the memories. But perhaps we are reading this wrong; through a haze of sentimentality. Perhaps the inhabitants are in fact happy to erase their memories connected to their house, happy to receive a check from the investors, with the hope to start something new in a different place.

 

Daniel Spehr

Tbilisi 1993
Photographs

When does daily life become a document? Tbilisi in 1993 was impoverished and damaged beyond recognition by the civil war. Electricity and heating ware a luxury, but life went on as usual. For the young generation, people that were kids back then, they remember this period with a certain kind of nostalgia, as this was their childhood. For an older generation, this nostalgia is hard to grasp as they compare it with better times, and the unknown future of the early 1990s scared them in the newly independent Georgia.

The Swiss photographer Daniel Spehr uploaded hundreds of photos of Georgia taken in 1993 to his Facebook account. The photos reflect the everyday life of people in Tbilisi in 1993. Many Georgians recognized themselves in the photos and shared these photos across their social network. These photos depict something very familiar and very distanced at the same time. One may try to forget the rawness and the poverty of these years, but is impossible to erase on the level of bodily experience.

 

Mikheil Svanidze

Informal Monumentalisation in Tbilisi
Photographs

Urban monuments form a core experience of everyday life in a city—projecting layers of political ideologies of both municipal attitudes as well as architectural and design singularities. But while much has been discussed vis-à-vis large and tone-setting monuments, their destruction and/ or removal from one place to another, little has been written about the numerous informal architectural and urban structures dedicated to what we might call small heroes –young men off the neighborhood.

The Saburtalo district of Tbilisi is home to a number of small monuments dedicated almost exclusively to young men. Functionally, these are mostly water fountains – local symbols of eternal life – bearing first names or nicknames of the deceased.

 

Giorgi Tabatadze

Media-Graffiti
Mosaic

Tabatadze reviewed extensive popular media material from the period 2003 until 2013 in order to look deeper into the mechanics of the socio-political and cultural conditions of Georgian society. Modern media formats produce 30-second to 2-minute news bits for 24-hour consumption, which then get replaced by other news bits. The driving idea behind this format is less about content and more about circulation itself, an endless and perpetual circulation of the news. Tabatadze translates these news bits from TV into a completely different medium – mosaics – which is an impossible mission.

Depicted on the mosaic shown at the Tbilisi Biennial is the destruction, soon after the Russian-Georgian war of 2008, of an enormous concrete monument in Kutaisi dedicated to World War II soldiers. For Tabatadze it is a powerful and symptomatic event in terms of understanding our relationship with history. For him it is an act of a country’s inability to come to terms with its own history, a futile attempt to eradicate the Soviet past.

 

Tamuna Chabashvili, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Koka Ramishvili Daniel Spehr, Gio Sumbadze, Victoria Tomaschko, Nazlı Tümerdem

Postcards from the Past
Postcards

This is a series of existing and specially produced postcards dedicated to the first Tbilisi Architecture Biennial. They either fit the theme of Buildings Are Not Enough or our sense of humor.

The postcard format gave us the possibility to show something that has already been exhibited without reproducing it, and to avoid the costs connected to shipping artworks. It is also an ideal format for various makers to wish the first Tbilisi Architecture Biennial exhibition good luck or write something about the time when the photo was taken. 

 

Photos by Guram Kapanadze and Sandro Sulaberidze.