TBC Concept and Ria Keburia Foundation present Koka Ramishvili's exhibition "Platform for Event". The exhibition is hosted by TBC Concept Flagship, at 7 Marjanishvili street.
Koka Ramishvili is one of the central figures in the history of modern Georgian painting. His work developed in the realm of the most challenging changes of the post-Soviet period and was, from the very beginning, distinguished by reflexivity, a precise selection of appropriate mediums and forms that related to the complex context. He is an inquisitive artist who always finds original connections between specific problems and abstract reasoning. The artist lives and works in Tbilisi and Geneva. His works are preserved in private and museum collections of different countries, including an audio video installation of the project presented at the Georgian Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale – Black Sea.
Koka Ramishvili has already cooperated with the composer Nika Machaidze, who created the sound for his new work Platform for an Event on many occasions. In a multimedia installation, invisible links unite the interior and exterior, geometric forms (circular and square halls) and the infinity of a landscape, climatic motifs of summer, and the sounds of everyday life. The images are slowly born in different dimensions, sensations, nostalgia, and allusions behind the empty surface. Its structure is built through the connections of space, light, color, sound, and time. The work bears the story of its creation, talks about itself, and presents the dramaturgy of light melancholy. Unspeakable units that can never turn into solid shapes are born only in momentary sensations, young people’s relationships with the universe, and in the sense of unity with it. Together with the polyphony of the environment, they create conditional, indescribable structures that cannot be expressed in words.
The only figurative image of the installation (photo printed on canvas) depicts a boy sitting on a boat trailer. The infinite surface of the sunlit sea has clearly cut windows - a specific quote from Koka Ramishvili’s iconic work The Last Gallery (1989), where the ribbons emerge from the frames hanging on the walls to intertwine like wires and occupy the entire space. The theme of breaking the frames of an image and expanding into space is a matter of constant focus for this artist and manifests itself in different versions.
Platform for an Event is a time-space interval for an unplanned waiting. The work is built based on the principle of performance, when an image is created through body language, movement in space, and application of choreographic plasticity, which are organized thanks to the endless flow of Nika Machaidze's multi-layered track (35 min.), where various echoes from the past, distant sounds of the beach, and future-oriented dynamics define a simultaneously nostalgic and expectant mood, introduces the viewers to the cinematic realm.
Koka Ramishvili's art is based on counterpoint interactions: ephemeral and sometimes completely invisible processes develop in a context of strict schemes and laconic concepts, creating constantly changing sculptures, always ambiguous conditional stage and the dividing curtain that raise questions about the possibilities of compositional structure, shape and lighting, color, texture, and content. His work covers many themes, however, as a whole, focuses on understanding of the idea of an inner landscape, which includes meditative, abstract visualization, as well as specific and documentary material.
Text by Khatuna Khabuliani, PhD, Art Historian, Curator
TBC Concept Flagship
7 Marjanishvili st, Tbilisi
Opening Hours:
Monday - Saturday: 10:00 - 20:00