Eliava Experiments, 2012
This is work made during a 10 day project in Tbilisi, Georgia for the "Streetwise: Discover Eliava Project" Organized by Lydia Matthews
Discover Eliava Project: Streetwise, Artisterium International Exhibition, Tbilisi City Museum Karvasla and Eliava Market, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. October 2012
Video artist Gabby Miller playfully cast local vendors into the stars of her footage while they collaborated with her to create basic green screens, onto which Miller later superimposed images of trains moving through the Vietnamese countryside--a mise-en-scene that collapsed local and global contexts and pointed to the transnational flow of goods that make their way into Eliava. Collaborating with owners of Eliava’s electronic equipment businesses, they installed these experimental videos so they were subtly screened within small video monitors for sale in the marketplace.
Learning from the Streets: Social Exchange and Knowledge Production
Streetwise: Discover Eliava Project culminated during the first two weeks of October 2012. A grassroots, multi‐disciplinary, cross-cultural and site-specific public art laboratory, it aimed to explore the unique character Eliava bazaar, of one of the last remaining open air markets in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. The project consisted of an open-ended exchange between Georgian and North American artists and curators as well as Eliava’s community members, and took the form of an evolving contemporary art exhibition, a series of art/design workshops in various cultural and educational venues, and a day-long open house Streetwise: Discover Eliava Festival at the marketplace. The overall project provoked the following questions: what forms of knowledge can artists, designers, scholars, students and local citizens use to resist the status quo and re-envision their environment? How can Eliava bazaar’s complex condition inspire creativity, while simultaneously being re-shaped into a more vital, socially just or ecologically balanced place?
Three minute excerpt from Eliava Experiments, 2012.
Videos made in collaboration with vendors, installed in various locations in market during Discover Eliava Festival.
Screening films made at the market in the market.
At the opening of Artisterium, I live screen printed these poster, leaving a blank space for people to fill in and display on the wall behind me.
The Georgian Edition of Imaginary Propaganda was made a few days after the election of the "GEORGIAN DREAM" party candidate, and in the wake of massive protests surrounding leaked videos of prison abuse by the ruling party.
FUCK can also leave space for the imagination.