Mamuka Japharidze - Still Life after Life

10 - 11 November,  2018

Moving Gallery, Sighnagi, Georgia

Project ArtBeat presents Mamuka Japharidze’s interactive performance and exhibition, Still Life after Life. The project will be carried out at Moving Gallery by Project ArtBeat on the territory of Sighnaghi City Hall. 

As part of the exhibition the artist invites you to participate in a live event to create a new set of cyanotype imprints. As an informal gathering around a table we will explore the poetics of actual time and place, and find the traces, left like footprints, during the printing process. Still Life after Life explores the phenomenon of disappearance, the desire to recapture lived experience, and the beautiful shadows we can only attempt to hold on to. 

The same type of experience took place in April 2000, in the framework of year of the artist, when three artists, Bruce Allan, Anthea Nicholson and Mamuka Japharidze, hosted a banquet for 200 artists and art amateurs in Bristol, east England. Food and drinks were placed on the table together with the works sent from different countries of the world. Mamuka covered the table with the paper of light-sensitive cyanotype. Dinner went great, people drank toasts, poets said poems, musicians played compositions. People went home satisfied. The next day, Mamuka made exposition for messy tables and he fixed waste from the previous day on the paper. The works created during the experiment will also be exhibited in Sighnaghi joined on Sunday with the works created during this event with your participation. 

Mamuka Japharidze (born in 1962, in Tbilisi) lives and works in Tbilisi and UK. The medium of his works changes according to the context and environment and includes: happenings, collections of objects and images, video projections, photography, linguistic games, drawings, sound design, prints, photo archives collected over a long period of time.

Since 1987, Mamuka Japharidze has been working on conceptual projects. TARTARA was presented at the Georgian Pavilion, the 48th Venice Biennale, 1999. In the same year a video projection, Eye Trees was presented in Atlanta. The artist’s works were exhibited at Georgian National Museum several times, including Reframing the 80s in 2012 and Re:Museum in 2014. With the works by other Georgian artists, Mamuka Japharidze’s installation was featured at the exhibition Beyond Credit at Art in General, in New York. In 2016, Mamuka Japharidze arranged an installation OptiMystic Translookation according to the principle of the camera obscura. The exhibition curated by Mariam Loria was held at Moving Gallery by Project ArtBeat. At the same time, the documentation of the project აქTV- black and white photos taken from the Tbilisi Funicular in 1995 was presented.

Coordinator: Nino Macharashvili 

Moving Gallery by Project ArtBeat will stop on the territory of Sighnaghi City Hall. 
Opening times: 10-11 November, 12:00-18:00. 
The project is realized with the support of Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of Georgia and Sighnaghi City Hall.