Georgian National Museum Festival opens with displays, talks and Night at the Museum special event

Night at the Museum activities will invite visitors to a range of venues during unusual hours. Photo: Georgian National Museum.

Agenda.ge, 15 May 2019 - 17:28, Tbilisi,Georgia

For just over a week starting today, venues of the Georgian National Museum network will be open for events and activities marking the 2019 GNM Fest, including the annual Night at the Museum special.

With exhibitions, educational programmes, book presentations, public talks and more, organisers at museums in locations from capital Tbilisi to the mountainous Svaneti province will invite audiences to the date that also coincides with International Museum Day.

The latter is celebrated on May 18, with three days of GNM Fest activities held in the run-up to the day. The festival opened on Wednesday at the Museum of Georgia, where a new initiative for integrating art education closer into primary schools was presented.

Young students will have access to museum exhibits, film screenings and behind-the-scenes work on theatre productions while writing reviews of stage art and viewing material from ethnographic items to works by contemporary artists.

Daniel Spehr captured people and places in Georgia’s capital during the social and political turmoil in 1993. Photo: Daniel Spehr/spehr.ch.

An selection of photographs by Daniel Spehr, who captured moments of Georgia’s capital in the tumultuous year 1993, will come to the Tbilisi History Museum, also known as Karvasla, on Thursday.

The focus of the festival will then move to the iconic Svaneti Museum of History and Ethnography, nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award in 2016, where films by Soviet Georgian director Revaz Tabukashvili will screen.

International Museum Day will be celebrated with a number of concurrent events, from a screening of a film by American traveller William Osgood Field, who visited Georgia in 1929, to a show of works by painter Kako Topuria at Karvasla.

An independent programme for the Night at the Museum date on May 18 will involve museum venues opening their doors to night-time visitors, in addition to an offer to attend launch of new visitor centre attractions at the site of the medieval cave city Vardzia in Georgia’s south.

A work by painter Kako Topuria, whose exhibition will open on May at Karvasla. Photo: Georgian National Museum.

Further displays, presentations and talks will include an anniversary exhibition marking a centenary of Georgian post marks at the Museum of Georgia and a joint effort with National Geographic Georgia to celebrate International Day for Biodiversity on May 22.

The Dmanisi Museum, located in the part of Georgia that heralded the major discovery of 1.8 million-year-old human fossils, and Tbilisi’s Museum of Ethnography, on the foothill of the road leading up to Turtle Lake recreational area in the capital, will also welcome visitors for the festival.

The 2019 GNM Fest will conclude on May 24.