Ria Keburia Foundation
01.02.2024
The concept of apocalypse, deeply ingrained in human history, serves as a foundation for ethical, political, and individual perspectives. Its transformative influence permeates our understanding of normalcy, manifesting on personal, societal, and global scales. On an individual level, it manifests through traumatic events, while socially, it materialises in the instability of political, financial, or religious landscapes. Globally, it emerges as an environmental crisis. The current discourse on apocalypse spans encounters with anthropogenic climate change, nuclear violence, polarised politics, colonial assaults, and capitalist extractivism. In the exhibition Apocalypse. Reflections, seven contemporary artists navigate the transition from old worlds to new, from world-ending experiences to apocalyptic imaginaries
This group exhibition, featuring the works of Ilia Balavadze, Teona Yamanidze, Jikia Luka, Elene Metreveli, Sopho Mamaladze, Mako Lomadze and Lidia Russkova-Hasaya, seeks to empathetically engage with catastrophes and crises. The underlying premise posits that, contrary to the immediacy of a catastrophe and its evident repercussions, our comprehension of such events is shaped by cultural imagination. Regardless of the traumatic form, our collective cultural repertoire dictates how we identify, analyse, and cope with catastrophes.
Apocalypse.Reflections provides a platform for diverse opinions, conveyed through multiple artistic voices. Ilia Balavadze’s characters navigate bamboo plantations, escaping an escalating epidemic, striving to restore order in a fragmented world.
Teona Yamanidze’s oil painting series The Playground and The Lockdown (Temporary Shelter) seeks to accentuate the jarring clash between expected safety, limitations and peril, portraying a vivid tableau of lost innocence and imposed maturity. These “painted memories” are the attempt to bring attention to the plight of the conflict affected people, symbolically using the playground and interior as a metaphor for loss and disrupted peace.
Jikia Luka’s oil paintings depict Indigenous people overcoming centuries of challenges, intertwining with the notion of Animism. Elene Metreveli’s multi-chaptered piece pays homage to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, drawing inspiration from the artist’s intuitive perception of reality.
Sopho Mamaladze explores the theme of solitude through reflections on the subconscious. Mako Lomadze’s artworks evoke the suspended atmosphere in Lars von Trier’s Melancholy, capturing a world on pause, anticipating the Earth’s last days.
Lidia Russkova-Hasaya’s installation investigates the concept of ‘intermezzo’, as presented by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, which denotes the possibility of focusing on the present when the past is deceptive and the future unknown.
Each artist, with unique perspectives on catastrophes and crises, opens doors to new ways of perceiving the world. History reminds us that civilizations have risen, believed in their invincibility, and ultimately declined. The defining factor, however, lies not in annihilation but in the presumption that we would be among the survivors. At the core of the post-apocalypse lies a delusional and perilous belief in newfound freedom. The question remains: is this assumption truly justified?
The Group Show is organised and supported by Ria Keburia Foundation at Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Arts
Text by Daria Kravchuk