Maia

Question 1: What is your name and your name at birth? What nationality is the passport you currently hold?

Maia Naveriani - Started with Soviet passport, then British and now Georgian too. To be continued...

Question 2: When and where does your biography as an artist start?

In London. After few years of moving there, after my divorce, when I truly started my independent life. Around that time I got nominated for a Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation art prize and totally unexpectedly got first prize of a significant sum that enabled me to realise some art projects.

Question 3: How many times have you shown your work in Georgia and when? / How many times have you shown your work elsewhere?

My work has been exhibited in Georgia since returning to Tbilisi in 2015 after 25 years. I had two solo shows and three group shows. Before that I was exhibiting in the West only.

Question 4: Why did you leave? / Why did you go back?

Since my childhood I was always attracted to everything unfamiliar and unknown. I was even fantasising about living alone in some big metropolis. I think this urge was based on my instinctive protest against the conservative patriarchal system of Georgia. So it was inevitable that while still a student, after meeting a nice guy visiting from England and a short romance, we got married in order to move to London. I guess besides a romantic motive, I wanted to escape the predictability and the routine of everyday life in Tbilisi. The reason why I’m here in Georgia now is this interesting transitional time - it feels like the cultural space is wide open and unarticulated and there is a genuine, fresh enthusiasm without cynical “cool” overtones just yet; and its very beautiful, inspiring nature and light. All together it‘s the dramatic contrast from living in a culturally over-saturated and “sorted” environment and then returning to nature that inspires me and revitalises the senses for further authentic research.

Question 5: Does your work reflect your biography?

I think by “archiving” the fragments from my biography and the repetitive use of related images, including my name, I detach and distance myself from these events and get a sense of the authentic order of things.

Question 6: Do you have any influences from any Georgian visual art tradition which you apply to your work? Why?/Why not?

I don‘t consciously choose to use any references from Georgian or other cultures. What I always find interesting though is a dissonance in any visual tradition that pushes art outside established norms of culture. Therefore outsider, self-taught artists are a big inspiration. Some frescos of mediaeval basilica churches in Svaneti, the ancient mountainous region of Georgia, had always intrigued me for their surreal narratives mixing pagan mythological and christian imagery in a bizarrely beautiful way. It could be that the juxtaposition of my own imagery is subconsciously effected by these frescos that I was looking at all my childhood summers.

Question 7: Would you define your practice as feminist?

Yes, I would define my text as feminist. It took me a while to acknowledge it and I realise that at the beginning it was an intuitive rather than conscious choice. Initially I subconsciously tried to sabotage everything that had an ideological, political or cultural claim and just followed my intuitive drift. Later, I articulated better that the symbolism and the text that I was working with was very much a feminist perspective. My own take on current female narrative is through investigating sexuality - the subject that is very intriguing for me and I think many issues regarding gender differences and related conflict are tied up in it. I suspect that thorough “research” of sexuality of both sexes and the reshuffling of the current hierarchy can help dissolve the harsh borders of dichotomy and destabilise the didactic narrative of patriarchal order. It is very evident at any level that the patriarchal system has become demystified and challenged. To be a feminist today in my opinion is not only fighting for equality but contributing to a change of consciousness, departing from the stagnating and didactic discourse of a phallic system. Maybe the female gaze is a point from where a new, open space could be detected...

Question 8:  Are you an active actant in the art scene of your current place of residence?

Art scenes of Georgia?

It feels like I am a tourist in the art scene in Georgia and I was an émigré in the West. Both statuses are of a temporary visitor - I love the symbolism of both images and use it in my work a lot. I feel like I‘m a traveler forever.