Alexandra Gabunia. Nino Gujabidze. "We are different"

Alexandra Gabunia. 2007

Clear dichotomy – male / female – exists in Georgian general thinking and while defining gender boundaries, feature chain is marked as “male” and “female”. Unlike the other sociological, political and economic disciplines gender discipline is unknown and exotic for contemporary art in our country. And that’s why it was very interesting to use contemporary art possibilities, space and visual specifications in this field as meaning of structure of creation of idea of mark, text, art production. What does it mean being a male or a female in contemporary art space? What motives induce gender roles for changes: thirst for freedom? How are created male and female masks? Search of new identity? Discord about female’s passive role in society? Does there exist female sphere in the Art? Of course physiology is least interesting in the context of these questions. International discourse that gender is social sex and contemporary art as the form of social expression, was symptomatic concord in our case.

Mobile exhibitions in different regions of Georgia - Bolnisi region, Kakheti, Guria, Akhlatsikhe – referred to exposure of peculiar conceptions of contemporary art, such as biological and social gender, taboo and humanism, cliche and stereotype, body and ideology, representativeness and context. Exhibitions were significant events for the cultural life of these regions. The main thing was not the works themselves that were distinguished by variety of specificities (painting, poster, photo, video, photoobject), but declaration of unification of coordinators, curators, artists, photographers on the basis of ideology by the motto: We are different.

The most important component of the project turned to be creation of 70 minutes experimental video production related to the abovementioned regions. The artists’ authorship-identity was underlined and the documentary film was reviewed as an art production; Sometimes with hard social background or odd history or maybe with ordinary common portraits, towards specific social persons (a man as well as a woman), in micro or macroprojections, objectivism was made on the basis of artistic view of feminity and sensitivity.

So called gender stereotypes exist in every culture. It implies the features related to womanhood and manhood. But in visual space gender – man-woman – loses its global quality, is splinters, divides into parts and mix with each other. Gender, age, birth time and place are easily changed in visual space and talking about actual topics is more convenient with conceptual images.

Nino Gujabidze. 2007 Establishment of Gender thinking in Georgian Society by Means of Contemporary Art or the Most Provincial Gender Balance in Georgian Regional Reality

Mise en scene developed around gender topic needed guideline thought out by each artist taking part in the project. Target regions selected in advance according to artistic view and experimental format, implied creation of mobile art document, that would promote establishment of word gender in Georgian language. Video session were got into geographic format of Bolnisi, Ozurgeti and Akhaltsikhe. The artist that temporarily was acting as a professional director at the same time, was open to lots of interpretations during searching gender balance or disbalance. Experimentalist director’s questions or other activities were a bit incomprehensible for the respondent and at a single glance was interpreted as deviation from the subject. On this surface answers in disguised form were the only way to find out gender essence. The emotional incitement emerged in the form of relentless objective reality or sometimes cheerful sense of happiness. One thing became clear:

National gender that does not get past chtrestomatic studies by gender equality and its content easily stands ideological surface of the Art, that on the one hand is determined by topicality of the subject. Gender ambivalence seen with the movie camera turned to significant artistic and verbal metaphor in Georgian reality. Modern gender by its content is unity of social and cultural norms that is obliged to anyone according to his/her gender by the society. A woman’s and a man’s psychological model is determined by social norms and not by biological gender.

Biological gender does not determine difference of their social role. In Georgian reality a human in routine is coming to non-acceptance of gender. Cultural-social symbolic interpretation of gender offers us identity to the artistic images. The format of documentary film seen by this interpretation recognizes significance of a female’s image (Natela Grigalashvili, Bolnisi) as a woman’s social role separately. Thus a woman is associated with artistic symbol of Georgian gender culture. Artistic image of Georgian provincial gender is associated with the artistic images that are conform to one general symbol that is a symbiosis of two origins and accumulate in one point.

Gender cultural symbolism is indicator of gender hierarchy. Artistic reality seen from the film view attempts to refuse biological, social, psychological difference between particular men and women. It only claims that the fact of difference itself is not as important as the fact of evaluation based on their sicio-cultural difference. Artistic-gender view is based on social significance and difference of a woman and a man that is attached by the society.

If our cultural consciousness is directed to inner harmonious unity it will reflex to the significant changes occurred in cultural paradigm. Thus penetration of gender topic in social thinking and its establishment in contemporary art underlines its legality and ideological values.