Twelve Women Gone Missing - A Questionnaire
Afterword
Contemporary Georgian art history as we know it, is fragmented and poor in terms of research.
Not only is it male dominated and does not cover all the other genders equally, but also seems to be geographically determined, strongly attached to the practices which developed inside of the country’s geopolitical borders.
The institutions who are responsible to voice such omitted artistic practices are busy remembering old, acclaimed and nationally important, all brilliant, but mostly male artists. They also happen to all be modernist, formalist, abstractionist, symbolist, but never feminist artists. In the absence of such active institutions, the platform for the development of Contemporary art as a discipline in
Georgia to this day were created by mostly independent initiatives. These are: CCA-Tbilisi, CCA-Batumi, Nectar Gallery, Artarea Gallery, Art Villa Garikula and others; Radio Tavisupleba and magazines: Indigo, Shokoladi, Anabechdi. These initiatives remain fragmented and not much connected to one another, failing to shape one string of a history, a canon.
The canon in terms of art history is that, which is regarded as the must at a university, what is displayed in a museum and published by institutions. The Canon is translated into cultural branding - the images on a local currency, on postal marks and postcards, etc. It is what first comes up on the int ernet, when searching for the icons of a certain culture.
What becomes the Canon, and what does not is a political decision. As Griselda Pollock argues, in the western tradition of art history, the canon is strongly Eurocentric and male dominated. She describes the feminist approach towards the canon: 1. Feminism encounters the canon as a structure of exclusion; 2. Feminism encounters the canon as a structure of subordination and domination which marginalises and relativises all women according to their place in the contradictory structutrations of power - race, gender, class and sexuality; 3.Feminism encounters the canon as a discursive strategy in the production and reproduction of sexual difference and its complex configurations with gender and related modes of power. Based on these positions, Danarti proposes to rethink the local art historical narrative, in order to avoid the mistakes pointed out in the research by Pollock. For this matter, I gathered some of the artistic practices yet omitted from the grand narrative of the educational system in Georgia, as well as rarely shown or written about in the above mentioned self-organized substitutes for impotent institutions.
In the absence of the research-based publications on the topic, in the form of a questionnaire I approach the artists directly to see how would they position their practice themselves, in relation to emigration, identity and feminism. The answers are different from one another, imbued with individualism. What they share in common is the non-belonging to any particular art scene. Partisans, one might call them, the warriors without uniforms, who do not belong to any party but their own, whose practice is individual, not supported by any institution but the one they represent themselves.
The issue argues that in the absence of an institutional dialogue Contemporary art development of Georgia split into two parts: one, which left and another that stayed in the country during various turbulences it experienced. Danarti issue 7, is an endeavor to reenact the possibility to the missed dialogue between the two and provide with a step forward into a deeper research of the subject.