Education: BA in Fine Arts, Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Position: Visual artist, co-founder and member of the artists’ initiative ‘Public Space With A Roof’ in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Interests: Mapping private stories, memories and questions into visual and tactile narratives; ‘being silenced’ and ‘one’s own voice,’ placed within the gendered discourse.
Languages: Georgian, English, Russian and Dutch.
City: Tbilisi/Amsterdam
Email: tamarmepe(at)yahoo.com
Biography:
Tamar Chabashvili is a visual artist based in Amsterdam and Tbilisi. Her art practice consists of individual and collaborative projects. After graduating Jacob Nikoladze Art School, she studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. She has obtained her BA in Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she lives and works since 1998. In 2003, she co-founded artists’ initiative ‘Public Space With A Roof’ (PSWAR), which functioned as a research project space until 2007. PSWAR projects are research-based and address various questions central in current art production. From 2004, PSWAR has been producing large-scale projects, 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, in places such as: Frederick Kiesler Foundation in Vienna, Austria; Centre Pompidou-Metz in France. Her current works evolve around the topics of tradition, routine and silence seen from the gender perspective. She uses traditional artifacts and methods (from arts and crafts) and tries to modify them and offer a new narrative that can challenge adopted positions on collective and personal level. In 2014, in collaboration with anthropologist Agnieszka Dudrak, she conducted a research project ‘Supra of Her Own,’ concerning gender-based violence against women in Georgia. The selection from this work was shown at the Kiev Biennale, ‘The School of Kiev,’ and in the parallel program of the 14th Istanbul Biennale, ‘Manifest Thought Form – A Route of Evanescence,’ at Kuad Gallery, Istanbul in 2015. Her exhibition in 2016, ‘The Book of Patterns,’ at the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi focused on the representation of ‘everyday life’ of women, who remain mostly unnoticed.
Publications:
2015 - Contribution to the publication ‘city [un]archived’ as part of the research project ‘Tbilisi In/Sights,’ published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, NL ;
2014 - Co-author of the publication ‘Supra of Her Own,’ self-published with the financial support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation (South Caucasus Regional Office) and Mondriaan Foundation, Tbilisi, GE;
2011- Contribution to the publication ‘Erre, variations labyrinthiques’ as part of the Exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz, FR;
2010 - Co-author of PSWAR publication ‘Passages Through (The Unfinished Monument),’ published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam, NL;
2007 - Co-author of PSWAR publication ‘Beauty Unrealized- spider webs of personal universes seeking a form’, published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam, NL.
Additional links:
https://supraofherown.wordpress.com