Tbilisi Crossroads

Following the Tbilisi Crossroads art residency (August 2024, Racha/Georgia), seven of the eleven participating artists came together again in mid-September 2025 and focused their work on community and collaboration. Some of the artists were still based in Tbilisi, while others had moved away in the meantime and returned for this reunion. After several online meetings for preparation and exchange, they developed a programme of diverse artistic practices, inviting fellow artists and the local public to engage in movement and informal dialogue. The aim was to support one another, other artists, and the broader community, using creative expression to address contemporary issues.

In the thirteen months between the art residency and the group’s reunion, Georgia underwent profound changes: growing political and societal division and ongoing protests emerged following the 2024 elections in response to increasing pressure on civil society.

Under these conditions, artasfoundation found it inconceivable to continue the project without adjusting its course. We therefore asked the artists whether they could contribute to the local communities in Tbilisi through various artistic practices that respond to the new reality. As individuals with diverse artistic backgrounds and experiences of conflict in other contexts, the seven artists, in cooperation with eight invited Tbilisi based artists, offered to create various artistic interventions, most of which took place between 14. and 28. September 2025. This intensive period was also accompanied by journalist Nini Gabritchidze. 

The September programme included: the exhibition Reality vs Reality by Anna Vasylioglo and David Grigoryan; a presentation of the art zine Decision: Other Cases by Danya Dvinskih as an artistic exploration of his entry ban to Georgia; participatory city walks by Hanna Sokur, Oksana Yushko and Volha Kavalskaya, which opened new perspectives on perception, democracy, and empathy. The programme also featured various lectures and presentations, such as Fragility of Belonging, on the subject of homing by Hanna Seliazniova, and Selective Empathy: from Bialowieza Forest to Georgia’s Borders by Volha Kavalskaya. 

These artistic contributions were complemented by a wide range of workshops in body and movement practices (Eteri Rousselle, G., Hanna Sokur, Jonathan Rousselle, Natia Chikvaidze and Davit Khorbaladze; curated by Natia Chikvaidze / PlazmPlatform). Additionally, workshops for young people were offered in zine-making (Xaraxura) and ceramics (Anna Khmaladze). The body and movement-based workshops continued until the end of the year, hosted at local performing arts space PlazmPlatform, allowing for a more in-depth learning. 

The artistic residency in the frame of the project Tbilisi Crossroads took place on 8.–18. August 2024, in one of the most beautiful parts of Georgia at the premises of Arteli Racha in the village Chkvishi, and brought together 11 artists from Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Palestine and Japan who currently reside in Georgia. They were selected from a pool of 49 applicants to represent the different fields such as the visual and performing arts, music, and cross-disciplinary sectors. 

During the recent years Georgia, a country in a very difficult political situation itself, has become home to several communities who arrived here for different reasons including the opportunity to work online during and after the COVID times, favourable economic and legal grounds offered to digital “nomads”, recent developments in the post-soviet regions (full-scale Russia-Ukraine war, armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan) and others. While Georgia became a melting pot of creative ideas bringing together individuals with different creative backgrounds and experiences very often the newcomers and the locals operate in their own bubbles without developing any substantial points of intersection and therefore sharing their creative products only within specific groups of people each of them living and working in parallel worlds. 

The residency attempted to explore the possibility of cooperation during the fragile times through sharing of artistic and human experiences, looking into the artist run initiatives and the ways of their independent and individual development, discussing urgent social and creative issues, and ideally producing a joint project. 

The residency was designed to create a context and a safe space where the participants were offered to build a professional network to support the internationalisation of artistic and cultural practices and making it more inclusive under the thematic frame of the “artistic cabaret”. The programme included work-presentations of all residents with a special focus on the socio-cultural context that motivated their works, workshops offered by the residents to each other, a trip to explore local cultural context of Ambrolauri and Oni, expert inputs on “artistic cabarets”, film screenings and discussions of preselected theoretical texts and articles. 

Tbilisi Crossroads was jointly carried out by artasfoundation and the Untitled Gallery Tbilisi.