Keta Gavasheli

The mixture of canvas, plaster, and concrete brings to mind prefabricated drywall modules; at times the panels appear freshly plastered and partially insulated, at others as if marked by water damage. The title of the series, Dear O, emphasizes the significance of the spoken word in Keta Gavasheli’s practice (“wallpapered” on the surfaces are text fragments taken from her spoken-word performance One-drop Reminder). It stands for the exclamation, the salutation, the open mouth, the objection and obstinate symbolism of a gendered letter. Drywalling connects prefabricated bar stock, often to divide up a space, and represents a transitional phase in the construction process. While this association can be explained biographically (Gavasheli originally studied architecture), it also points to the work’s conceptual core. Drawing on the “Italian” courtyards of Tblisi – which actually date back to Persian caravanserais, and whose hybrid, heterogeneous architecture provided the backdrop for Gavasheli’s childhood – Dear O probes the border between private and public space, isolation and connectedness, individual and world. Gavasheli surveys the configuration of the individual body that is occasionally aware of its own isolation; its involvement and inextricable coexistence with its surroundings. Alongside concrete architectural references, she also draws on the motif of water, which is often used within feminist posthumanism to loosen up restrictive concepts of corporality. Here, each of the five panels contains a drainage hole, a central element of Gavasheli’s work since the time of the pandemic. One night in lockdown, the plughole of the artist’s bathroom sink became a loophole in a maze of pipes and channels connecting individual homes. It seemed as if everything was carrying on as normal, reassuringly undisturbed, like the inner workings of a living visceral system. In this sense, Dear O might stand for either the great “oceanic feeling,” as Romain Rolland once described the experience of “being one with the external world as a whole,” or the small opening in the sink, which as a point of connection to the infrastructures behind it offers a sense of the world in its entirety. To stick with the image of water, they both run out to largely the same thing.
– Anna Sinofzik