IKI

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.

2012 – ’’Eliava Terminology Guide’’ – in collaboration with Nini Khuroshvili – is an illustrated dictionary about car parts. It aims to encourage people to reconsider the implications of Russian words they still use on a daily basis. Our motivation for doing this project was to enhance the mood of the car mechanics who work in Tbilisi’s Eliava market by communicating with them about tangible and intangible dynamics within their work environment. We wanted to investigate the subtle yet powerful role language plays in shaping their identities. The market’s workers became the co-designers and co-authors of our dictionary. The graphic design of the ‘’Eliava Terminology Guide’’ was inspired by the mechanic’s drawings and the calligraphy on their shops’ signs.

2014 – The photo documentation of the above-mentioned project ‘‘for Eliava Terminology Guide’’ shows how local workers and handyman at the Eliava market were designing their Blocks, looking for forms of their own stylization of Georgian letters to make signage esthetically appealing, attractive, and easily understandable. These signboards are taken down as time passes and are replaced by homogeneous looking printed banners.

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 installation (‘‘for Eliava Terminology Guide’’ photo zine and A3 screenprints). Exhibition “Grüße aus Georgien” curated by Sophia Tabatadze at Kunstpunkt Berlin, 2019