Beyond Credit

Participating artists: Thea Gvetadze, Mamuka Japharidze, Gio Sumbadze, Nika Machaidze, Nino Sekhniashvili.

Curated by Wato Tsereteli

Beyond Credit features the work of five Georgian artists who are highly regarded internationally but less well known in the United States. Beyond Credit seeks to explore the artist’s process, as a mixture of modes involving rational thinking, intuition, contradiction, accident, mistake, and absurdity, all of which serve as the building blocks for not only their artistic practices but also their lives. The show aims to investigate the artist’s condition as one who is trained as a “professional creative,” and how that creativity often infuses the habits, structure, and trajectory of their individual paths. What does it mean to live a life in a state of unbroken creativity, detecting inspiration and art everywhere and at all times? The notion of “credit” in this context suggests the status and position of artists in relation to over commercialized and monetized aspects of art as products. Beyond Credit attempts to not only present finished pieces authored by the five artists on view, but rather to show evidence of five lives as the result of their ongoing creative processes, and to consider these lives as continuous, unfolding artworks themselves.

The exhibition Beyond Credit is presented in partnership with the Center of Contemporary Art in Tbilisi, Georgia. 

Special support for this exhibition has been provided by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, New York and Project ArtBeat, Tbilisi, Georgia.