Tbilisi Crossroads

The artistic residency in the frame of the project Tbilisi Crossroads took place on 8.–18. August 2024, in one of the most beautiful parts of Georgia at the premises of Arteli Racha in the village Chkvishi, and brought together 11 artists from Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Palestine and Japan who currently reside in Georgia. They were selected from a pool of 49 applicants to represent the different fields such as the visual and performing arts, music, and cross-disciplinary sectors. 

During the recent years Georgia, a country in a very difficult political situation itself, has become home to several communities who arrived here for different reasons including the opportunity to work online during and after the COVID times, favourable economic and legal grounds offered to digital “nomads”, recent developments in the post-soviet regions (full-scale Russia-Ukraine war, armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan) and others. While Georgia became a melting pot of creative ideas bringing together individuals with different creative backgrounds and experiences very often the newcomers and the locals operate in their own bubbles without developing any substantial points of intersection and therefore sharing their creative products only within specific groups of people each of them living and working in parallel worlds. 

The residency attempted to explore the possibility of cooperation during the fragile times through sharing of artistic and human experiences, looking into the artist run initiatives and the ways of their independent and individual development, discussing urgent social and creative issues, and ideally producing a joint project. 

The residency was designed to create a context and a safe space where the participants were offered to build a professional network to support the internationalisation of artistic and cultural practices and making it more inclusive under the thematic frame of the “artistic cabaret”. The programme included work-presentations of all residents with a special focus on the socio-cultural context that motivated their works, workshops offered by the residents to each other, a trip to explore local cultural context of Ambrolauri and Oni, expert inputs on “artistic cabarets”, film screenings and discussions of preselected theoretical texts and articles. 

Tbilisi Crossroads was jointly carried out by artasfoundation and the Untitled Gallery Tbilisi.