Work in progress
In April 2008, I stayed in Georgia for 2 weeks to establish contacts for a new artistic project. The project consists of two parts
The first part consists of trying to visualise the life of a Georgian family, particularly a mother and her daughter, Nina. It is the intention that I will go back in 2009 to Tbilisi to spend some time with them. I will visualize their lives, and their life together, so that a certain period will be presented on the basis of paintings, interviews, sounds and drawings. Both the mother and daughter are Georgian from Abkazia, refugees from the early 90s (1993) and have fled from the city Sukhumi to Tbilisi. For a long time they stayed in a small hotel room in bad conditions in Tbilisi. The mother has English parents and was a teacher in English and history. The daughter is an English translator and is currently working for an international organization in Tbilisi. On the basis of photographs and documents obtained partly thanks to Sophia Menzante, a photographer based in Tbilisi, and partly through the internet, I have a series of portraits and drawings of the mother and daughter regarding their lives as refugees.
On my return to Georgia, I will re-portrait mother and daughter in their contemporary situation. I will work as a visual anthropologist using recorded images displayed on the basis of drawings and paintings. These images give a reliable impression, on the basis of their apparent reality and their daily lives. Why I want to combine the past with the present is not from a desire of nostalgia, but it serves a way to better understand their past and how it relates to their current situation.
My task is to manifest their lives, discover, and recognize their values while estimating and then displaying them so that the audience / spectator understands their thinking without hinting at my own view of their lives.
The second part of the project consists of reconstructing the five-day war between Georgia and Russia through paintings and drawings based on newspaper clippings. Like any war, there is ample use of propaganda, but what is new, is that they are also fighting for airtime and media attention by PR agencies commissioned by both of the warring parties.
Is the Russian threat real? And moreover, is Russia the true aggressor? Is our vision of the West the right one? And if so, by how far?
The central painting is a portrait of a mother just after her son was killed during the bombing in Gori. The theme of mother and child is central in this project. It is a classic and familiar theme in the art of the Greeks and Romans, through the Middle Ages, and right up to modern and contemporary paintings. The paintings of mother and child are sometimes endearing, sometimes poignant although not sentimental or beautiful, but completely realistic.
The second part of the title, War in Context, is based on the website of Paul Woodward. He has created this website in an attempt to publish texts as a critical reaction against political decisions in the United States which are often fraught with blind emotions. It is assumed that a world out of balance will lead to a world in conflict.
