Tbilisi culture institutions, projects to benefit from increased city financing
Mayor of Tbilisi (pictured right) announced a "whole host of programmes" being launched by the city hall in support of the Tbilisi culture scene. Photo via Kakha Kaladze on Facebook.
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Culture institutions and projects run in Georgia's capital will start benefiting from an increased financial support from the Tbilisi City Hall, mayor Kakha Kaladze said on Wednesday.
Kaladze told reporters the city hall would begin allocating a larger budget to events, programmes and organisations of the culture scene, in a bid to help them overcome challenges of the COVID-19 crisis.
"[We] held a number of meetings with representatives of the culture field to hear about their concerns. [The culture budget] will be increased in order for us to be able to support different representatives of the field and enable them to overcome the pandemic period without major pressure," Kaladze announced.
Lending land and building space - currently owned by the city hall municipality - to entertainment venues, and starting a series of open-air music performances were two of the examples of the city-wide support for culture Kaladze mentioned in his comments.
The Tbilisi mayor also added a "whole host of programmes" were being launched by the city hall in support of the city's culture scene.
While exhibition spaces and cultural institutions shut down across Georgia over the last week as a measure against the new coronavirus, the Georgian National Museum has made available digital tours of its collections to museum-goers staying at home.
Three major clubbing venues in Tbilisi have temporarily shuttered their doors to ensure prevention of a spread of coronavirus infections at large gatherings, with Bassiani, Mtkvarze and Khidi announcing decisions to suspend events on calendar for the rest of the month.
With various sectors of economic activity and socialising reopening in Georgia following the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the culture and health ministries have now published guidelines for cultural and artistic organisations to prepare their spaces for hosting audiences again in the near future.
The Batumi International Art-House Film Festival will make its 2020 edition particularly relevant to this year's theme by running an entire section for films about social isolation amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Georgian state cultural agencies' efforts in keeping up cultural projects and activities during the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown have drawn praise from the cultural policies platform Compendium.
As the physical art scenes remain in shutdown due to the new coronavirus outbreak, works by 30 Georgian creatives explore the "new reality" in a digital group show available in videogame form on the internet.