In a giant former Coca-Cola factory, Georgian and Ukrainian artists united for Culture Week Tbilisi, a show of defiance and solidarity that captured the harrowing reality of life under siege
High on a hill above Tbilisi stands a cathedral-sized monument called the Chronicle of Georgia. On the stone floor between its vast, Stonehenge-style pillars, people are pasting 128 large printouts of black-and-white photographs of children’s faces. The children are all refugees, mostly from Russia’s war on Ukraine; a few older ones were displaced when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and claimed Abkhazia and South Ossetia. All 128 live in Tbilisi now, and have been photographed by Marina Karpiy, a local wedding and portrait photographer originally from Ukraine. “I asked a boy where he was from and he told me, ‘I am from a place that no longer exists’,” she tells me, as the final images are pasted in place. “He was from Mariupol.”
We onlookers move out of the way, and the faces on the floor are photographed by drones flying overhead. The spectacular sight will form part of Inside Out, a larger project by the French street artist JR celebrating communities around the world. The event is also a highlight of the first Culture Week Tbilisi, a five-day festival in the Georgian capital that seeks to bring together Georgian and Ukrainian artists in a show of solidarity, community, pride and defiance against their common oppressor. Or as the text at the entrance puts it: “We propose to fight propaganda with art, digital loneliness with live communication, and hostility with trust and openness.”
