Tamuna Chabashvili
She is a visual artist based in Amsterdam and Tbilisi. Her art practice consists of individual and collaborative projects.
In 2003, she co-founded artists’ initiative ‘Public Space With A Roof’ (PSWAR), which functioned as a project space until 2007. PSWAR projects are research-based and address various questions central in current art production, blurring the borders between various roles artists are assumed to take today: artists-as-activists, artists-as-producers, or artist-as-curators. Since 2008, PSWAR projects have been shown internationally.
Her current works evolve around the topics of tradition, pattern and voicelessness seen from the gender perspective. Mapping private stories, memories and questions into visual and tactile narratives her work is often inspired by the traditional artifacts and the working methods based on textile. Her work further explores the properties already inherent in textile as material such as: fragility, mobility and ability to contain or shelter.
http://www.pswar.org
https://supraofherown.wordpress.com
Memory Foam
The starting point for this work is an image of the building in front of my house in Tbilisi. I discovered this building in 2005, when my family settled in a studio-apartment that was illegally constructed on the rooftop of a 16-story apartment building.
The facade of this partially inhabited and unfinished building was intruding into my daily reality but at the same time it mirrored my personal state at that time. Each inhabitant shaped the facade of the building according to their individual needs by completely ignoring construction, urban and public law. The endless transformation process (of extending, reconstructing and adding) that kept the plurality of approaches together offered a particular aesthetic.
In order to retrace that overwhelming experience of temporality that clearly influenced my own perception of home as an endless process, I decided to print the image of that building on a mattress, the most intimate companion of our body, which often holds our imprints as stains and as time passes it slowly adapts to the shape of our body.