xelovnebis saerTaSoriso Jurnali - Artisterium

in it. There is as yet little sign of an art of ethical risk in Georgia. But there is though an art of physical risk, as is evident in the
performances of George Kevle (born 1971) and Nik u. sha (born 1979), whose effectiveness depends partly on the potential
physical harm the artists subject themselves to. This is combined with a directness and an extreme, almost facile simplicity. In
Kevle’s Alubily (2005), for example, the artist received a general anaesthetic before a gallery audience and then slept for twelve
hours, the apparent inconsequentiality of this act being precisely its point: Kevle’s performance, like death itself, was a nonevent,
an event outside time, in so far as it did not properly begin before he received the injection, by which time, of course, it was
in effect already over. In Nik u. sha’s Hop (2005) the dangerous act – jumping from the Metekhi Bridge in the middle of the night
– evoked metaphors both of death and rebirth, suggesting that the terrors of the one must be a precondition for the other.
In their simplicity and directness these performance have some affinities with Mikhailov’s work, but their greatest similarity is
in a readiness not to fear consequences, to potentially sacrifice everything, in pursuit of their purpose – in Kevle’s case, that of
shocking his friends out of the depressive stupor that seems to pervade Georgia’s younger generation. It doesn’t of course follow
from this that their work will develop in the same direction: ethical risk is not a necessary progression from physical risk, only a
possible one. Such a shift would require these artists to turn their work from one that potentially harms only themselves to one
that might potentially harm (and here I include the notion of outraging or offending) others. But if an art of this kind were ever
to emerge in Georgia, it seems possible it will come from this direction. Unless and until it does the human tragedies of the last
fifteen years, of war, dispossession and economic collapse, are likely to go largely unrecorded in any serious art.
© Nathaniel McBride, writer, translator, London
Sophia Tabatadze, ‘Subu -diet’, 2005 posters in the
streets of Tbilisi.