Diva Debut
Animation, sound, sculpture: screen, leather, fabric, metal, 2021.
In a three-minute long animation, Diva Debut is singing and distorting excerpts from the prominent Georgian opera Daisi (Sunset) by Zakaria Paliashvili, 1923.
Diva never performed on stage before, never was in opera, or in a theater play, but they were always there, behind the spotlight. Even though they were disregarded by history they were present and we all somehow knew it. Diva is a thought, a feeling or a being that always existed beyond the mainstream patriarchal themes and constructs that are dominating traditional masterpieces and cultural heritage. The same is for the opera Daisi (Sunset) which revolves around topics like love, tradition, masculinity, nationalism and war.
”Chewing Fat” Kristina Kite Gallery. Curated by Nancy Lupo. 2021-2022
Chewing Fat
Group exhibition ”Chewing Fat” Kristina Kite Gallery, curated by Nancy Lupo, Los Angeles, 2021-2022.
‘‘But, precisely this slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling atop each other was what, without anybody noticing, was making the construction in the air very heavy: it was getting saturated with itself: getting more compact, instead of getting more frag- ile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air. Like a building in which everyone sleeps calmly at night, unaware that the foundations are sagging and that, in an instant unsuggested by the peacefulness, the beams will give way because their cohesive strength is slowly pulling them apart one millimeter per century. And then, when it’s least expected —-in an instant as repetitively common as lifting a drink to a smiling mouth during a dance —-then, yesterday, on a day as full of sunlight as the days at the height of summer, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and a jackhammer shattering stones and children laughing and a priest trying to stop, but stop what? yesterday, without warning, there was a loud sound of something solid that suddenly crumbles.’’
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.