NOT IN STATIC

A monument to Ali and Nino, the characters in the novel of the same name by Said Kurban, which has become the embodiment of moral purity, faithfulness, loyalty and everlasting love has been erected on the promenade in [the Georgian Black Sea resort of] Batumi. Each statue is seven metres high. The rotating figures move towards one another, changing places every 8-10 minutes, until they meet and come together into a single whole. Then they part and everything begins all over again. Lit from within, they are moving, creating the illusion of the reality of what is happening. The author of the lovers' sculpture is Tamara Kvesitadze, an artist from Georgia. Only because this monument exists and lives an independent, almost mystical life, recalling the friendship between the peoples of Azerbaijan and Georgia, was the sculptor able to go down in the history of fine arts, even if she had not created anything else except this sculpture. She has had a personal exhibition in Baku, timed to coincide with a pleasant and important event, namely the second anniversary of the opening of the "Kukla" ["Doll"] Art Gallery. The organisers of the exhibition were the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the National Art Museum, the Museum Centre and the "Kukla" Art Gallery.  

About her

Tamara Kvesitadze was born and grew up in Tbilisi. She graduated from the Tbilisi Technical University. At the beginning of the 1990s she was living in Italy and at the end of the 1990s in New York. She and the engineer Paata Sinaia set up the Tamara Studio. She took up making dolls, but there are heaps of original dolls in the world. Tamara was keen on their clock-work mechanism. A clock-work doll has a fascinating force, exercising power over people. The kinetics imparted to the doll an almost mystical mysteriousness and magnetic attraction. The doll became not just a special one, but a provoking one. It fascinated and surprised, frightened and attracted simultaneously.

Tamar Kvesitadze: "When I first saw Baku, I realised that I would return there a few times. Baku is a very beautiful place for bringing my ideas to life. For this city I have specially prepared a mixed exhibition in which water colours, sculptures and statues are interwoven. I would like my exhibition to be like a greeting to my Baku friends."

Clock-work doll

This doll is like an artistic retelling of the impressions and sensations that the artist felt in Italy. To be more specific, in Venice. In this work there is the feeling that life has become a carnival like a process of flowing from the past to the present, from the present to the future. A woman dressed like a bird, a woman in a mask like a symbol of purity and the fall from grace, uniting what cannot be united. This provides cause for endless reflection.

Her Majesty

The female force is like a military armada. The reason for this is that, if a woman wants something, if a woman has an aim, she will undoubtedly achieve it. It is probably not accidental that the word for war [in Russian "voyna"] is female in gender. What is more, the history of mankind has accumulated a sufficient number of examples of war beginning because of women. To be more precise, owing to love for them. Well, let us recall for example, Helen of Troy, [Spartan king] Menelaus and Paris! You see, two countries became embroiled in bloody fighting, battling for the right to possess the beauty.

The dress

"What, what, what are our girls made of?" I recalled these lines from a little song in my childhood. But it's true, what are they made of? The frame of the female figure is reminiscent of a very old bottle - at one time in tsarist Russia they used to have a glass bottle to keep vodka in. Inside, along the slit in the skirt you can see a storage place for human heads with eyes closed. Is this the graveyard of accumulated female victories? Of unrealised "exploits"? Or is this simply women's dreams that have been buried? On both sides of the split in the dress there are red and white dahlias. In the language of flowers this means caprices and inconstancy. In ancient times the dahlia was regarded as a symbol of being regal, and these flowers grew in the gardens of tsars, princes and grandees, but were not accessible for ordinary people.

Оn the wheel

A little devil is comfortably ensconced in the palm of the right hand, obligingly holding out a couple of flowers and cake to a female circus artiste. She is holding a hula hoop in her left hand, inside which an angel with little wings is sitting. He is sorrowfully waiting for her to stop believing the intrigues of his rival and to pay attention to him. But, you see, the ways that women seek the truth are fairly original! She can see what is not there at all… Ah, is it difficult to trick her? What's more, she's still young and pretty. Should she be thinking about her soul?

A woman with the soup tureen

Men in different poses have taken up places around the hem of her skirt. They are asleep. The woman's head is crowned with soup tureen. But she herself has put her finger to her lips as if telling everyone to be quiet. We mustn't disturb the sleep of those we treasure and love. A woman is the guardian of calm, quietness and slumber. She herself represents harmony and is an example of femininity and maternal concern.

Embrace

This sculpture also rotates. At one moment, while you are watching it turning, you get the feeling of some kind of trick, even a deception. Well, how can that be? The figure of embracing people either turns on its own axis or it is as if it has been cleaved with a sword, the halves moving apart to the sides, so that they can again draw close to one another and feel themselves in each other's embrace. As you watch it, you are reminded of the legend of the ancient giants. They were like a single whole. In this lay their strength. But the gods became angry when they saw this: people posed a danger to them when they were like that, because they had become equal to the gods! Then the decision was taken to divide the androgynous being into two beginnings: male and female! Since that time these two halves have been wandering around the world, striving for each other in quests for that component of kinship that they lost at the whim of the gods…

Ballerina

The figure is a metaphor. But it is like a woman's nature! Especially a woman of art. Life and intellectual experience allow her to transform this experience into fantasy, presupposing the instant of the birth of art. Her torso is carefully constructed of men's heads. They are getting on next to each other very well, forming some kind of stable component of the very creative work and personal life of the ballerina who does not allow herself to lose her head. On the contrary, everything is under control here. Everything comes from the mind. Everything is rational. But how then does the moment of truth occur which is called creativity? How is great art born? Evidently, Anna Akhmatova was right when she reflected on the contradictory, at times mutually exclusive and paradoxical, ways that a work of art is born: "When you know from what dirty linen poetry grows to our shame." There is no fixed brink, no line which would help in being aware of the instant of the artist's flight of fantasy, that which allows his own soul to soar and ours to fly upwards…

Watercolor panel

This panel has been located in such a way that, when you walk through the whole exhibition, your glance comes up against scattered figures of human beings in different poses and positions, who are lost in the expanse of the author's fantasy. Both men and women. They truly look as if they are seeking one another out in order to unite with each other. To unite and occupy a position in the centre of the panel. A man and a woman. Lovers and those in love. People seeking love, aspiring after it, dreaming of it.  As if to find the sense of life and a way of acquiring your very self. In grief and in gladness, in health and in sickness, in the life that you need to "live through without crossing the field!"

Tamara Kvesitadze is an artist, a creative person, an experimenter, a woman who is seeking the sources of harmony through her creativity, lighting up the essence of things. This harmony reconciles us to the world in which we live. Artists are provocateurs, you see! In the best sense of the word. Because they excite our thoughts, compelling us to ask questions about ourselves, to seek answers to numerous questions and ultimately to become convinced of the many-sidedness of the activity that surrounds us…