Rusudan Khizanishvili, Let the Dogs Out

An experimental conversation with four women in three rooms,
on the occasion of the exhibition ROOMS & BEINGS at 68Projects, Berlin.

by Viola Lukács

Berlin, museums, theatres, and other cultural spaces are all shut down due to the COVID-regulations. Luckily galleries are open because they qualify as retail shops. I had an exciting appointment at 68Projects, the project room of the Kornfeld Galerie. The bright white-cube space is located right off the Kudamm, on Fasanenstraße and marked with a funky neon front sign. I had an unfinished conversation with these three women; there were so many feelings and stories that hadn’t yet been spoken out. I wanted to hear the people behind the art show, behind this magnetizing exhibition with vibrant colors and vivid creatures. I often feel that I am left alone in an exhibition space with objects like lost signals from someone I google and find nothing but shells of representation. What if the artist were genuinely present as a human​ being, mother, and friend? I knew it would be a special meeting with the artist Rusudan Khizanishvili, curator Nina Mdivani, and lang​uage coach Sarah Brown. We all came from different cultures and have crossed each other’s paths somewhere in the past. The Tbilisi-based painter, Rusudan inspired Nina’s first book; The King is Female. Their gently growing friendship accommodated vivid professional collaborations as of the present exhibition ROOMS & BEINGS. I met Nina Mdivani at the NADA Art Fair Miami in 2018, and since then, our NYC-life had been interwoven through exhibitions and art events. I moved to Berlin last October, and due to a fortunate coincidence, made friends with Sarah. She happened to be fervent about Georgian culture and the magical power of Caucasian women. Under the cold shadow of neon lights, the gallery director Shah​ane Hakobyan and the gallery co-founder Mamuka Bliadze kindly welcomed Sarah and I. What was immediately striking in the space is the presence of those curious black dog-like creatures. While the suspicious spirit animals shamelessly jump from canvas to canvas, the Internet was about to connect the four women in three rooms across Tbilisi, New York City, and Berlin. During the conversation, the loose connection between us turned into a unique relationship formed by curiosity, joy, and trust.

Viola Lukács: 68Projects displays 14 new paintings created during the pandemic. How did COVID-19 influence your practice and affect this exhibition?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: Right before the pandemic caused global lockdowns, I was working with live models. Due to lockdown, I could not invite models to my studio, so I continued with painting people near to me, namely my daughters. Also, two paintings on view at the gallery are my self-portraits. This time has been a fascinating journey for me, allowing me to think, observe, and paint how outside events affected me as an artist. The COVID-situation has indeed influenced my work in various ways. First of all, I have changed the materials and went back to oil paints bringing me to an exciting journey as an artist and a human being. I had more time to dive into my thoughts and gained freshness to develop other techniques. I also started to work with ceramics, which gave me a new emotional grounding. At the beginning of the pandemic, I began to paint live models and deliberately decided about symbolic objects and their feelings. The painted rooms with portraits will demonstrate this transformation in the show.

Viola Lukács: Nina, curating from a distance, became more common due to the pandemic. How do you feel about this particular project virtually connecting Tbilisi, Berlin, and New York?

Nina Mdivani: The idea for this show had been on my mind for quite some time. I continuously work with Rusudan and know her interest in human morphosis within the familiar boundaries. This year has been transformative on many levels globally; this fall seemed like perfect timing to showcase these recent works. Living in New York and curating a show at the gallery in Berlin with an artist from Georgia invests in a curator with a particular set of responsibilities while at the same time providing an obvious context of 2020. By this self-evident context, I mean the borderless world we all inhabit that is affected by nearly the same emotions of doubt, wonder, fear, isolation, freedom within new limitations. I am excited to be able to do it this year.

Sarah Brown: How do your Georgian culture and your upbringing influence your practice?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: If you look at my earlier paintings, you can see the difference between each period. When I change the idea and the concept, the visual language changes as well. So, since 2013 it seems that I am moving away from any sort of traditional Georgian dialectics. I believe that art is universal and should not have any national content.

Nina Mdivani: Coming from a culture with strong and authentic visual and literary traditions has informed me from early on to connect local events with broader frameworks, larger systemic events either in art or in history. By comparing local with global, colonized with decolonized, capitalistic with proto-capitalistic, I can draw parallels that sometimes are not as evident for others. Also, I feel responsible for presenting Georgian culture in a coherent and understandable context which is sometimes challenging based on the themes I am working on within any given exhibition. According to Zdenka Badovinac, Eastern European art cannot be fully understood if taken out of a specific social context, different country by country in that region, and particular traditions and interpretation methods.

Sarah Brown: Nina defined your visual language as “multilayered, expressive and consisting of several narratives influenced by the subjective story of the artist as well as history, culture, and feminism.” The colors in your paintings are bright, beautiful, and aggressive. What do they mean to you?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: The color part of the paintings in my works is as important as the meaning and idea. My most influential professor of painting was Bejan Shvelidze at the Tbilisi Academy of the Arts. During ten years of study, we learned to use color to create harmony and beauty. It took me several years to completely change this principle to my own and master color as a weapon. My color scheme is as bright and disharmonious as it is essential.

Viola Lukács: One of the central pieces appears in a rich combination of cold-warm, complementary and analogous colors; dominantly yellow-gold, red, violet, and Tyrian purple with emerald green. The focus of the composition is on the sphinx-like creature firmly standing for the title: Victory. Where is this vivid vision coming from?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: That ́s right. Victory is one of my key paintings because I find it ultimately resolved in terms of composition and color. I was watching Visconti ́s trilogy while I was painting it and therefore there might be parallels to his rich textural approach to film-making.

Sarah Brown: Do you see the finished picture in your mind before you begin to paint? What was the process of painting “​THE LAST ROOM. EXIT,” ​and where it ends?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: Actually, I can see the paintings in color and the figures’ dynamic, but in the process, some details might be changing.
First, I do the background and paint the walls of the room, later adding the figures. Then I look at the painting, and if there is nothing to add, it means I have finished this particular piece. But if the idea is still interesting to me, I will carry it and will continue to paint another piece to connect these works.

Nina Mdivani:​ ​Narratives play a dual role in Rusudan Khizanishvili’s paintings as there are always at least two stories to be told. One is more obvious and could be read from the first glance as here; the artist is portrayed during the last weeks of lockdown in Georgia (hence The Last Room). The self is doubled because it possesses two natures, emotional and physical, abstract and concrete. The second narrative is much more subtle and opaque. It has a lot to do with two mysterious figures, one of them a sphynx, another ‘a dark soul.’ If you know Khizanishvili’s other works, you will recognize the assemblage of various creatures that populate her domain, migrating across canvases, acting as guardians. Sphynx is among them, and as an archetypal mysterious link to our deep history, it connects our fears and ambiguities through a symbolic thread. The final piece of the interpretation is up to us: what is passing between the two women – the two parts of one whole? Why is the sphinx there? Is the second black-figure connoting something dark and heavy, thus liberating the sitters of its oppressive presence by leaving them or, on the contrary, attesting to their loss of something important? Maybe it is a power figure, as demonstrated by its valiant and victorious stance.

Sarah Brown: The little dark creatures that accompany some of the people in your pictures, what do they represent?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: They bring something from inner philosophical space, probably thoughts, and fears. They stand for themselves, connecting me with the ancestry of the World. I believe we were so connected to Nature in the past that we are always subconsciously yearning to get back to this state, to get some of the superpowers back. These beings embody these longings; however, they differ in each particular work. The beings are black because they are mysterious, and black is the most magical color, not completely understood. As we know, it includes all other colors of the color spectrum inside it. Metaphorically, we all have some kinds of beings inside of us, and I let them out and live.

Viola Lukács: ​The Boys’ Room​ feels like a scene from Once upon a time in Hollywood. The two male characters are facing the viewer with exceptional charm and curious confidence. Who are these people?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: The left one is a well-known photographer in Tbilisi. The younger generation is fun to work with. The other character in this painting is a Georgian jewelry designer; he is my daughter’s friend. They are both confident young men, successful in their creative careers, faces of new, young Georgia.

Nina Mdivani: As Mamuka pointed out earlier, technically, this life portrait evokes brilliant visual solutions of Matisse and Van Gogh, but in terms of figuration, Rusudan evokes German expressionism. As a strong colorist, Rusudan’s work has definitely references to Neo-Impressionists and Fauvists. As a figurative painter, her artistic process is referencing past masters of the medium, including German expressionism and its urgency, compositions that evoke deep reactions in viewers.

Sarah Brown: Is your painting an emotional process? Do you express and refine emotions, or is it more methodical?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: Both. I paint very expressively and emotionally, but I know what I am doing and its purpose. But my progress is very emotional. Well, painting for me is filled with magic and mystery; during the working process, I cannot be distracted by anything. I am concentrated on work, and sometimes I am afraid to be interrupted by something to miss the connection with the source. Life is an up-and-down proc​ess; as a human, I am affected by hundreds of small events that affect me emotionally.

Viola Lukács: Looking at The Shelter painting, I feel an elementary vocation to eroticism. Would you please elaborate on your affective symbolism, which would engage the viewer almost in a somatic way?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: Some are interested in death, but I paint life! And life consists of various experiences; you can see some of them in my works. Some have erotic overtones; some are more intellectual. 1001 Nights is one of my references as Scheherazade. I am painting stories day by day, a thread of repeating beings or people running through all my work.

Sarah Brown: In the time I spent in Georgia, I saw beautifully strong women as maternal queens of the household, but put into smaller, limited, defined female roles out in society. Therefore I’m curious about how this influences the representation of your strong female figures.

Rusudan Khizanishvili: My mother always deeply supported my artistic career. However, I paint various archetypal female figures; loving Madonna, seductive witches, and younger, more independent women are the women we all encounter in life. I want to show that archetypal women we all are at one point or another.

Viola Lukács: The Galerie Kornfeld is dedicated to presenting one of the most diverse selections of international art in Berlin with a particular focus on contemporary Georgian artists; ​Tamara Kvesitadze, ​Tezi Gabunia, Nino Kvrivishvili, an​d Levan Chelidze. Next year they celebrate the iconic female painter of Georgian Modernism, Natela Iankoshvili. How did you get to know Alfred and Mamuka? I am curious to learn about the social network relationship behind your exhibition and this fruitful collaboration.

Rusudan Khizanishvili: I met Alfred Kornfeld and Mumuka Bliadze at the Armory Show in New York in 2016. Next, Nina collaborated with me and the gallery on the book King is Female: Three Artists from Georgia that Nina wrote in 2017 and was published the following year. In 2018 she curated an exhibition with the same name that also included my works. This year we had this exhibition, and the gallery presented my work at Shanghai ART 21 fair this November with a very favorable reception. We all hope to continue this collaboration in the future. Kornfeld Gallery does an outstanding job of presenting very striking, fresh art from Georgia and elsewhere.

Nina Mdivani: Rusudan’s work is devoid of any ethnic or nationalistic markers, making her unique in contemporary Georgian art. On the contrary, she uses her own stories and mythology to present a broader view of human nature and being human, his or her boundaries and challenges. If I were to stress what is culturally Georgian in these works, it would be their theatricality. The theater has a long history and plays a significant role in Georgian culture and personalities. In Rusudan’s case, this theatricality also connects her to the Scandinavian traditions of Henrik Ibsen and Lars von Trier, who both are essential to her on an intellectual level.
The nature of human relationship here is more intellectual than emotional. We are connected as a curator, and as an artist, we can see the same things and express them in our respective practices. Later on, this communication between us produces an emotional reaction in the viewer. One thing to mention about Kornfeld Galerie and 68 Projects (its project space) is that the gallery has been consistently supportive and showing Georgian artists over the last eight years because they feel enchanted by their culture and visuality. So, this adds to your question about relationship networks. As a curator, first of all, I stand for meaningful art. Art that pushes boundaries of what could be done with canvas and paint, clay or bronze. It’s central to me, how these simple materials can affect humans from different cultures, how they can show us something about ourselves that we did not consider before. Conceptual or gender models are essential, but they could only add to a presence, not act as substitutes for artistic meaning. As a curator, I am also for conceptual understanding, for the context, for the historical perspective. So, as a cultural producer, I am bridging these two ephemeralities intending to be that bridge, to strike a conversation that could be timely and interesting in New York, Berlin, or Tbilisi.

Viola Lukács: What if your art had an imminent power over the world. What would it change?

Rusudan Khizanishvili: I hope that we would become much more attentive to ourselves and each other’s personalities. We would learn to speak without words and overcome the disharmony of the world around us.

Rusudan Khizanishvili (1979) lives and paints in Tbilisi, Georgia. She has received her two BFAs in Painting from J.Nikoladze Ar​ t Scho​ol and from Tbilisi State Academy of Art. In 2004 Rusudan received her MA in Film Studies from Tbilisi State Academy of Art. Over the past fifteen years Khizanishvili has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Museum of Modern Art Tbilisi, Museum of Literature of Georgia, Tbilisi State Silk Museum, Mark Rothko Foundation, Daugavapils, Latvia, Galerie Am Roten Hof, Vienna, Austria, Arundel Contemporary, Arundel, UK, New Image Art Gallery, Santa Monica, USA, Kunstverein Villa Wessel Iserlohn, Germany, Norty Paris, France, Triumph Gallery, Moscow, Assembly Room, New York, Window Project, Georgia. In 2015 Khizanishvili represented Georgia among five other artists at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. Her works are presented in the collection of the Georgian National Museum; private collection of Stefan Simchowitz, LA; Breus Foundation, Moscow.

Nina Mdivani is Tbilisi-born and New York-based independent curator, writer, and researcher. As a curator and as a writer, Nina is interested in discovering hidden narratives within dominant cultures with a focus on minorities and migrations.

Sarah Brown is a Berlin based English Language Coach. After spending time in the Republic of Georgia, she became fascinated by its ancient language and history.

Viola Lukács currently lives in Berlin, writes and curates contemporary art. Her ​research revolves around the performative aspects of space and technology.

The show will be on view until January 9. at 68Projects, 68 Fasanenstrasse, Berlin [check for covid updates].