IKI ( 2012 – 2016)
IKI is a project connected to Eliava – industrial market in the center of Tbilisi (Georgia)
IKI consists of several projects in various mediums: zines,
silkscreen prints, posters, clothing design, video, Lecture/performance.
About Eliava
The market in Eliava is a space, where you can find everything connected to machines, among other items. Championing the proletariat class, the Soviet Union greatly influenced Georgian handymen’s terminology, so even today workers there keep using Russian terms in their speech and shop signage. While walking in this area you will witness signboards full of Russian barbarisms, many written in Georgian letters.
2016 -‘’IKI’’ is a project about Georgian-Russian industrial slang and it’s visual socio-cultural narratives. It explores how the language itself has the ability to operate as a martial art using fluidity, adaptivity, transformation for survival. In this project, I draw a parallel between ‘’IKI – Linguistic martial art’’, as I call it, and the Creole language – described by Edouard Glissant in ‘’Poetics of relation’’.
IKI – linguistic martial art based on Georgian industrial slang. Lecture/performance. Duration 10 min. Exhibition ‘‘Welt Ohne Außen’’ at Martin Gropius Bau. Berlin 2018.
IKI- linguistic martial art based on Georgian industrial slang. Lecture/performance (duration 30 min) at Mutterzunge, Babylon. Berlin 2018.
Photo: Mathias_Voelzke
