Georgia’s 10th annual art festival begins

Revellers are being invited to attend Georgia’s national art festival, which is now open at the Open Air Museum of Ethnography in Tbilisi.

The seven-day outdoor festival, named Art Gene, will showcase demonstrations in martial arts, handicrafts, choreography, and folklore and modern music from various regions of Georgia.

Georgian handicrafts at the Art Gene Festival in the Open Air Museum of Ethnography. Photo from Art Gene website.

Organisers said this year’s festival was special as this year was the 10^th anniversary of the annual event.

A spokesperson said the festival’s main goal was to promote and increase the popularity of Georgian traditional folklore. To do this, those involved decided to research and gather famous and unknown materials to be presented to the public within the festival.

Georgian national dance performance at the Festival. Photo from Art Gene website.

The newly-found materials would be correctly archive so it could be preserved for future generations.

"Today, as we celebrate the 10^th year of the festival’s existence we can proudly say that this is one of the most successful and highly attended events in Georgia, and it generates a wide audience of all generations and ethnicity,” an Art Gene representative said.

The Art Gene Festival at night. Photo from Art Gene website.

Throughout the festival, guests will be entertained by concerts and events with participants from different parts of Georgia and further abroad. A wide variety of traditional arts and crafts exhibitions will also be on show and on sale.

The Open Air Museum, which featured objects of traditional art and architecture from different parts of Georgia, is located in Tbilisi’s Vake district, near Turtle Lake.

The Museum exposes 14 ethnographic zones of Georgia; each of which presents the particular historic-ethnographic area of the country.