ART: “Tbilisi” exhibition—this one organized by Arts Interdisciplinary Research Lab (AIRL) and Kunstmuseum Bern (artforum.com)

Left: New Jerseyy directors Tobias Madison and Dan Solbach. Right: Art historian Nana Kipiani and curator Daniel Baumann at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire.

“TBILISI IS FAMOUS for its huge watermelons in summer; the currency is called lari, and you get Chanel-stamped plastic bags for your grocery shopping.” Or so Basel-based artist Tobias Madison summed it up. I wanted to see for myself (Google Maps just proffers a beige mass), and so last Tuesday, as friends were calling up Continental tickets to Miami on their BlackBerrys, I boarded a plane from JFK to Kiev with a midnight connection to Tbilisi for the sixth annual “Tbilisi” exhibition—this one organized by Arts Interdisciplinary Research Lab (AIRL) and Kunstmuseum Bern curator Daniel Baumann, with Ei Arakawa, Ani Chorgolashvili, Nana Kipiani, Gela Patashuri, Gio Sumbadze, Ana and Tea Tabatdze, Sergei Tcherepnin, and others. This edition, “Never on Sunday,” would start while I was in the air, but catching even four of the six days seemed worth the jet lag.

Although every iteration of the show takes a different form, this year billed paintings, films, musical scores, and recordings by artists from Tbilisi—not to mention Berlin, Frankfurt, New York, Oslo, Riga, Zurich (the list goes on)—to be performed, presented, distributed, enacted, and sold in this fifteen-hundred-year-old city of four million in the Caucasus. Almost all flights into and out of Tbilisi take place in the middle of the night. The airlines tell you the schedule is a matter of economics—cheaper airport fees for off-hours operations—but in hindsight, perceptual reversals seemed the country’s signature logic.

full article >>>