Commissioner: Marine Mizandari. First Deputy Ministry of Culture
Curator: Joanna Warsza
Venue: Pavilion at Arsenale
Marine Mizandari: 'All of the pavilion is dedicated for people to rethink the urban question, comprehend the connections between the social issues and the everyday living'
Joanna Warsza: 'I first learned from Kamikaze loggia both from Gio Sumbadze who lives and works in Kamikaze Loggia and from Levan Sabashvili, an architect at Urban Reactor Tbilisi. I found it so interesting because I'm coming from Poland where we also have Soviet architecture and we never had this domesticated way of appropriating this architecture. We would destroy it, leave it or praise it; there was never a personal relation to it and i found it really interesting as to how people said Ok, this era is over so we build over it and i think it is a very powerful, emancipatory gesture.'
In conversation with Artarea, Georgia's first Internet Television dedicated to culture.
http://tbcartarea.ge/
Introduction to the Catalogue for the Pavilion:
Some of the interesting reviews of the pavilion:
'In the Giardini, architecture itself seemed the theme of the day, with Sarah Sze dissolving the bounds between indoors and out with her expansive installation Triple Point at the US pavilion, and Simryn Gill removing the roof altogether from the Australian digs. The Georgian pavilion looked a little Swiss Family Robinshvili, a treehouse tacked onto an older building, but, as artists Sergei Tcherepnin and Gela Patashuri explained, this type of parasitic “kamikaze loggia” is a relatively common feature in Tbilisi.'
http://artforum.com/diary/id=41403#readon41403
An insight into the pavilion and the artists participating from the Culture Trip.
'An unlikely emblem of independence from the Soviet State’s mass dictations, the anarchic ‘lodges’ which were built during the early ‘90s were used as terraces, artist studios, extra rooms, or even open refrigerators - and simultaneously signalled the Georgian people’s need for personal freedom and self-initiated ‘beautification’.'
http://theculturetrip.com/europe/georgia/articles/georgia-s-do-it-yourself-loggia-transforms-the-biennale-landscape/
'“Kamikaze loggia” is a type of vernacular architecture widespread in Georgia’s capital city of Tbilisi: ramshackle extensions tacked onto existing Soviet modernist apartment buildings, added by residents to increase living space. Their nickname “kamikaze,” is a pun reflecting both their daredevil construction and uniquely Georgian character, as traditional Georgian surnames end in “-adze.”
Documenting and embodying “informality, bottom-up solutions, and the concept of self-organization in Georgian art and architecture,” (in the words of very-talented curator Joanna Warsza), Georgia’s pavilion is indeed built kamikaze-style – it’s a rickety-looking wooden structure on stilts leaning against an old building behind the Arsenale, holding site-specific works and texts by artists including sculptor Thea Djordjadze. The surrounding space was activated during preview days with a stream of performances by participating artists, such as the Bouillon Group’s daily Religious Aerobics, acting out gestures of prayer from the world’s major religions. As with oO, it could be concluded that staking a claim on space (cultural, physical, bienni-al) is a seriously athletic endeavour.'
http://www.uncubemagazine.com/news/9544571
A very interesting review of the pavilion and the artists participating:
BOULLION GROUP
'An art collective founded in Georgian capital in 2008, Boullion Group create public/private, religious/ideological counter poles through performance, installation, artistic acts and interventions.'
Boullion Group performing
THEA DJORDJADZE
'has been deeply influenced by the Georgian architectural landscape, subtly concealing it in abstract works with references to domesticity, music, modernism, science or politics.'
NIKOLOZ LUTIDZE
' a visual artist, actor and performer who incorporates architectural reality into his projects.'
GELA PATASHURI EL ARAKAWA SERGEI TCHEREPNIN
'One Georgian, one Japanese and one American artist have created a multidisciplinary team that, since 2005, has been originally blending performance, sound and architecture.'
GIO SUMBADZE
'created the Tbilisi-based Urban Research Lab (URL), a platform for artists, photographers and architects. Studying and archiving evolving Soviet infrastructure, often seen as a derivative of Marxist ideology.'
http://theculturetrip.com/europe/georgia/articles/georgia-s-do-it-yourself-loggia-transforms-the-biennale-landscape/
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