After a two-year break due to the pandemic, Madame l’Ambassadeur Esther Eppstein welcomes Irina Kurtishvili to the message salon embassy.
The Georgian artist and curator will give a lecture entitled “Caucasus – A Reference Archive” at the Kunsthalle Zürich, and showing original material from her constantly growing collection on the subject of Georgia and the Caucasus. In her lecture, she talks about the cultural and living space between Occident and Orient, the mighty mountain ridge with snow-capped five-thousand metre peaks, the place of longing for untouched nature and the images of it in our minds, about clichés and “branding”, and draws a line through cultural-historical references from Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat to Medea, Prometheus and Soviet folklore. “Caucasus” is not least a geopolitical space that is under constant tension, which has once again been pushed into the Western European consciousness by the ongoing unrest in the regions of North Caucasus, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the war currently being unleashed by Russia in Ukraine.
The lecture is accompanied by
Irina Kurtishvili “Kaukasus – Ein Referenzarchiv”
message salon embassy Zine No. 20, German, b/w 70 Exp.© 2022 Irina Kurtishvili and message salon
Irina Kurtishvili was born in 1964 in Georgia, then still part of the Soviet Union, and now lives between Cologne and Tbilisi. She has realised numerous exhibitions, publications and initiatives in Germany and Georgia with a focus on architecture, art and film in Georgia and the Caucasus region. Irina Kurtishvili is the founder of the Architecture Ambience platform, which combines artistic and curatorial practice, research, archive and collection work.
In Zurich in 2021, the curator presented an exhibition on the history of architecture in Georgia at the Architektur Zentrum Zürich as part of the Georgian cultural festival “Brücke: Zurich-Tbilisi”, the curator presented an exhibition on the history of architecture in Georgia.
Artist Residency at the 25hours Hotel Langstrasse, 6-20 May.
With thanks to Daniel Baumann, Kunsthalle Zürich and Vadim Levin, Video. Kindly supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur and 25hours Hotel Langstrasse, Zurich