Artists: Nene Beridze, Mariam Razmadze, Ioanna Tsulaia, Sopo Sheitnishvili, Teo Maspindzelashvili
Exhibition title: Here and There at The Same Time
Venue: Window Project, Tbilisi, Georgia
Date: February 3 – March 28, 2023
Photography: Sera Dzneladze / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Window Project, Tbilisi
Here and There at The Same Time brings together the works of five young female artists, Nene Beridze, Mariam Razmadze, Ioanna Tsulaia, Sopo Sheitnishvili, and Teo Maspindzelashvili in an exhibition that examines the idea of a young woman in a cityscape. The works by the exhibited artists respond to the urban landscape and eclectic cultural and ideological codes present in the city’s current state.
Taking into account the fact that women’s urban experiences from their own perspective have tended to be overlooked, the exhibition focuses on the way the city shapes the form and influences the artists’ subject matter through urban material encounters such as rust, PVC, graffiti, advertisements, political posters, religious imagery and tangible leftovers from the past power structures. While some of the artists in the show are exploring the poetics of urban zones through curiosity with new materials and their relations to social codes, others are romanticizing an escape from this current state of hyper-connectivity, consumerism, and the oversaturation of spaces by materials.
The exhibition title is referring to Gillian Rose’s metaphor of Paradoxical Spaces, in which she notes that women’s experience of occupying any particular space, especially urban environments, can’t be mapped through traditional subject-space relationships. Here women are located in multiple social spaces simultaneously and can occupy the centre and margin at the same time. It is a possible reason why female artists and poets are often reluctant to take ownership of the city but, at the same time, can offer a more complex and reflective gaze of the subject. A gaze that has travelled from a distance through all the multiple and paradoxical lived-in dimensions.
