Relic.Again.

The country of Georgia and I are of the same age. Both of us grew up together, went through the agony of teenage years, and the search of our identities in the midst of the chaos and uncertainty. We witnessed a civil war, a transition from the Soviet atheism into a predominantly fundamental, patriarchal Orthodox Christian nation and the recent ongoing cultural revolution led by the young generation.

I was raised in an Orthodox Christian family. My father was and is a prolific and well-respected iconographer working on church frescoes and icons. As a child I often observed him at work, which has significantly influenced my style of image making. But unfortunately, due to the gender stereotypes prevalent in Orthodox culture and the Georgian identity, female artists are often excluded from the creation of ecclesiastical art.

Moving through the range of media, such as performance, painting, sculpture and interactive installation, my work is an abstract deconstruction of memories, censorship, gender, inclusion/exclusion, Soviet past and the experience of growing up around Orthodox mysticism. By replacing the familiar dogmatic imagery of Georgian religious icons with iconography and symbolism of my own invention, I create personal subjective mythology through the repetition of symbols. The center of this mythology is always a female figure.