The exhibition brings together works by artists Emir Burjanadze (1937 – 2014) and Nino Sakandelidze (1985), belonging to different generations and practising different artistic expressions. Language – identity, environment – introspection, time – history, personal – collective, hidden – conscious… The continuous chain of such dialectical questions poses as the main thesis, as a totality of opposite poles near the gap, where all is silent.

The exhibition, as a dialogue announced in this silence, is built on mutual concepts, different creative approaches and epochal signs. The dimension created by dialogic connection prods to think about updated versions of reality. “Meeting” in the exhibition space is an act realized through the visual dialogue between these two artists. Representatives of two different generations of the same family symbolically make us think of such a reality of life, where temporal distance is manifested as a creative, cultural feature. What are the marginal concepts that Georgian art speaks of? How is the question of cultural identity understood by the artist working in the 1960s in comparison to the contemporary visual artist of the XXI century?

Analysing Georgian cultural identity is the main preoccupation of Emir Burjanadze’s work. This is the subject of the years-worth research for the artist. Emir’s inexhaustible search is manifested in experimentations with the ornament and font and graphic decoration, all superimposed with the Georgian archetypal culture and architecture. An experiment, as a spatial understanding of a form and a research unfolds in Nino Sakandelidze’s sculpture and painting. Sakandelidze constructs a new visual reality by referring to the private in the general. She is inspired by social, national and sensuous-empirical circumstances of her own past. The search for form in her sculptures is an echo of the Soviet Iron Curtain or is a reference to Emir Burjanadze’s linear structures.

How shall one orient themselves through the culture-forming layers of identity? This question as a challenge reveals the general characteristic of the ornament – double coded, conflicting dimension. On the one hand, it is a union with the traditional understanding of the ornament’s aesthetics and on the other, its transgressive rejection. The exhibition offers to break through the domineering visual accents of decor, to expose the dominant and characteristic repressiveness of the culture, where the ‘perfect crime’ awaits its constant renewal. The joint exhibition of Emir Burjanadze and Nino Sakadelidze is an inversive act – a synthetic ornament preparing for the transition to the conditionality of time… slow movement… A reconciliation and an elegy of memories… standing at the threshold between two worlds, where congruence is in discovering the difference.