Madame l’Ambassadeur Esther Eppstein again welcomes a resident at the message salon embassy in Zurich, after a two-year pandemic break.
Irina Kurtishvili (Cologne/Tbilisi)
On May 18, message salon embassy will be a guest at Kunsthalle Zürich with the lecture “Kaukasus – Ein Referenzarchiv” (Caucasus – A Reference Archive) by Irina Kurtishvili.
During two weeks Madame l’Ambassadeur takes the Georgian artist and curator Irina Kurtishvili on an expedition through the Zurich cultural scene. At the end of the message salon embassy residency, Irina Kurtishvili will give the lecture “Kaukasus – Ein Referenzarchiv“, specially created for Zürich, at the Kunsthalle Zürich, with material from her diverse and, for years, constantly growing collection. She talks about the cultural and living space between Occident and Orient, the mighty mountain ridge with snow-capped five-thousand-meter peaks, the place of longing for untouched nature and the images about it in the mind, about clichés and “branding”, draws an arc by means of cultural-historical references from Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat to Medea, Prometheus and Soviet folklore. “Kaukasus” is not least a geopolitical space under constant tension, which has pushed itself back into Western European consciousness due to the ongoing unrest in the regions of North Caucasus, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and the current war unleashed by Russia in Ukraine.
The artist and curator Irina Kurtishvili was born in 1964 in Georgia, at that time still part of the Soviet Union, and now lives as a commuter between Cologne and Tbilisi. She has realized numerous exhibitions, publications and artistic initiatives in Germany and Georgia with a focus on architecture, art and film in Georgia and the Caucasus region. In Zurich in 2021, the curator presented an artistic exhibition on the history of architecture in Georgia at the Architektur Zentrum Zürich as part of the Georgian Cultural Festival “Brücke: Zürich-Tbilissi”. Irina Kurtishvili will give the lecture „Kaukasus – Ein Referenzarchiv” at the Kunsthalle Zurich at the invitation of message salon embassy.