Tamuna Chabashvili - The Fabric of the Everyday Life
29 - 30 September, 2017
Moving Gallery, 39a, Rustaveli str, Tskaltubo, Georgia
Project ArtBeat and Tskaltubo Art Festival Present a solo exhibition The Fabric of the Everyday Life by Tamuna Chabashvili in Tskaltubo, Georgia.
“For this exhibition I use elements from my previous works: a tablecloth, a bundle and a patter book to create a new narrative in the context of a Container, a mobile exhibition space. The containers are usually intended to store and transport goods, while keeping its content invisible. Putting emphasis on hidden content my works will speak about the women’s painful experiences that mostly remain unnoticed.
All those works are based on textile and take their reference from the utility objects from local crafts. By looking at the complexities of everyday life as patterns, my attempt is to speak about the violence of the daily routine dictated by the social or cultural norms. Each and every work is an attempt to offer the space for the unheard voice.
Traditionally the tablecloth is decorated by women and kept within families often for decades despite stains and mends they accumulate. These family treasures, like diaries, hold personal memories the traces of which remain invisible. Associated with collective space, the tablecloth can make public the issues that are kept silent.
A bundle, a rectangular piece of cloth, is connected to mobility and has been an essential item to carry and store personal belongings, during one’s journey or relocation. As a devoted companion to the holder it represents an archive of one’s lived experiences.
A Pattern Book is a collection of samples for different patterns on fabrics and is used as a guide to possible designs. As a presentation space it can collect and store the elements that are challenging the traditional patterns and offers space for new narratives.
The works will be placed on the wooden tables from the local families, specially collected for this occasion.” – Tamuna Chabashvili, 2017.
Tamuna Chabashvili (b. 1978, Tbilisi, Georgia).
Tamuna Chabashvili’s art practice consists of individual and collaborative projects. After graduating Jacob Nikoladze Art School, she studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. She has obtained her BA in Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she lives and works since 1998. In 2003, she co-founded artists’ initiative ‘Public Space with A Roof’ (PSWAR), which functioned as a research project space until 2007. PSWAR projects are research-based and address various questions central in current art production. From 2004, PSWAR has been producing large-scale projects, blurring the borders between various roles artists are assumed to take today: artists-as-activists, artists-as-producers, or artist-as-curators. Since 2008, PSWAR projects have been shown internationally, in places such as: Frederick Kiesler Foundation in Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou-Metz in France.
Chabashvili’s current works evolve around the topics of tradition, routine and silence seen from the gender perspective. She uses traditional artifacts and methods (from arts and crafts) and tries to modify them and offer a new narrative that can challenge adopted positions on collective and personal level. In 2014, in collaboration with anthropologist Agnieszka Dudrak, she conducted a research project Supra of Her Own, concerning gender-based violence against women in Georgia. The selection from this work was shown at the Kiev Biennale, The School of Kiev, and in the parallel program of the 14th Istanbul Biennale, Manifest Thought Form – A Route of Evanescence at Kuad Gallery, Istanbul in 2015. Her exhibition in 2016, The Book of Patterns, at the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi focused on the representation of ‘everyday life’ of women, who remain mostly unnoticed.
Tamuna Chabashvili lives and works in Amsterdam and Tbilisi.
The project is realized in the framework of Tskaltubo Art Festival with the support of Children and Youth Development Fund & Tskaltubo Art Festival.