[onomatopee.net] Composed of artistic accounts that critically reflect on recent urban and social changes in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, this book unveils multifaceted perspectives on a city trying to negotiate its complex heritage, intensely contentious present and potential for the future. It also serves as an alternative guidebook to be explored in situ, or read from afar.
//////BIO'S EDITORS ///
Data (David) Chigholashvili works between social anthropology and contemporary art. His works are strongly related to the specificity of their contexts. Through direct commentary or subtle forms, he aims to present and question issues of the surroundings, while exploring connections between various disciplines and ways of expression.
Nini Palavandishvili is a curator based in Tbilisi. Nini researches social and political conditions and their interpretation in cultural production and contemporary art contexts. She is interested in artistic practices that find a language through which it is possible to speak about political and social matters.
Marike Splint is a theater maker from the Netherlands based in Los Angeles, specializing in performance in public space. Fascinated by the theme of belonging, she explores the relationship between people, places, and identity. She serves as a faculty member in the Department of Theater at UCLA.
Andrea Kalinová (visual artist) and Martin Zaicek (architect) have collaborated since 2011 as the initiative Abandoned (re)creation. Their work deals with the issue of derelict, abandoned or endangered architecture of the 20th century and its possible preservation by means of artistic interventions and alternative forms of protesting.
www.abandonedrecreation.com
Tigran Amiryan is an independent curator, contemporary art researcher with a PhD in Literary Studies. Tigran researches and writes about narrativization of both individual and collective memory in contemporary culture. He has presented lectures, exhibitions and public talks at different academic and arts institutions in Armenia, Georgia, Morocco, Russia, Tunisia, Ukraine.
Oleksandr Burlaka is an architect and artist based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he studied architecture. Oleksandr is interested in the connection between the vernacular and the modernist. His work includes research, collaborative art practices, and often considers architecture and its transformation in post-Soviet countries.
Tamuna Chabashvili is an artist based in Amsterdam and Tbilisi. Her practice revolves around the topics of tradition, pattern and voicelessness seen from the gender perspective. Mapping private stories, memories and questions into visual and tactile narratives, it is inspired by traditional artifacts and working methods based on textile.
www.pswar.org
supraofherown.wordpress.com
Data (David) Chigholashvili works between social anthropology and contemporary art. His works are strongly related to the specificity of their contexts. Through direct commentary or subtle forms, he aims to present and question issues of the surroundings, while exploring connections between various disciplines and ways of expression.
www.geoair.ge
Onno Dirker is an artist living and working in The Hague, the Netherlands. Sense of place, formed by a myriad of layers, lies at the heart of his work. His approach is phenomenological, never commencing from a set viewpoint. He is a co-founder of Atelier Veldwerk (Studio Fieldwork, Dirker-Luijters).
www.onnodirker.nl
Paula Durinová is a documentary filmmaker, photographer and journalist. Driven by the emotions of visuality, the focus of her storytelling is people and places that surround her. She mainly deals with topics concerning post-communist countries, social issues, spiritual life, mental borders and dreams or human imprints in seemingly dystopian lands.
www.pauladurinova.com
Christian van der Kooy studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. His work consists of documentary photography and video essays. He is particularly interested in people’s interaction with their surroundings, the landscapes - spaces of coexistence and reciprocity, where a personal history generates cultural and social transformations.
www.christianvanderkooy.com
Lado Lomitashvili works between the different media of drawing, photography, artist’s books, sculpture and installation. In his abstract works, essential elements are architecture and product design. While working, he mostly looks at spaces from an architect’s perspective and creates site-specific installations.
Tamar Nadiradze is a visual artist. Through artistic research she explores and makes connections between social life and contemporary art, which she mainly turns into experimental publications and drawings. She is interested in topics connected to dialogue in social life as well as anthropology, mythology, psychology and gender.
Nini Palavandishvili is a curator based in Tbilisi. Nini researches social and political conditions and their interpretation in cultural production and contemporary art contexts. She is interested in artistic practices that find a language through which it is possible to speak about political and social matters.
www.geoair.ge
Lena Prents is a Belarusian independent art historian and curator based in Berlin. Her main areas of research are history of architecture, art and culture in Eastern Europe during the late socialism, and exhibition history and practices in connection with socio-political discourses.
Ana Ramazashvili is a PhD student in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Tbilisi State University. Her dissertation is an ethnographic study of economic, social, cultural and spatial aspects of the Lilo Market in Tbilisi. Additionally, she is interested in urban changes and started making the alternative tour of the Gldani district.
www.facebook.com/urbanaretbilisi
Nino Sekhniashvili is an artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her artistic language is not defined by any specific media but attempts to go beyond traditional and contemporary visual techniques. Sekhniashvili is the founder of the gallery and performance basement Nectar (Tbilisi) which exists since 2013.
www.gallerynectar.ge
Marike Splint is a theater maker from the Netherlands based in Los Angeles, specializing in performance in public space. Fascinated by the theme of belonging, she explores the relationship between people, places, and identity. She serves as a faculty member in the Department of Theater at UCLA.
www.marikesplint.com
Katharina Stadler is a Tbilisi based conceptual artist and writer. She works processbased on discourses of ideology connected especially to notions of new forms of colonialism and imperialism as well as on the issue of limits of consciousness through social mechanisms and other determinants.
www.katharinastadler.com
Sophia Tabatadze was born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in 2002 at the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Her practice is more of an autonomous artist in Europe and curatorial in Georgia, where she organizes projects through GeoAIR. Currently she lives and works in Berlin.
www.sophia-tabatadze.com
Giorgi Zagareli has a qualification in interior design. Currently he works on abstract forms of small mathematical shapes. He is also interested in experiments on furniture design, rapid prototyping, studying open sources and exploring old crafts. In 2010 he founded media platform designtbilisi.
www.designtbilisi.ge
