Online exhibition explores digital interaction and creativity in crisis

An online group display bringing together works by Georgian and foreign creatives is taking a look at questions of creative possibilities in changed global circumstances amid the pandemic.

Bringing together 18 works by 33 participating artists, the show has been entitled Man With a Webcam | Digital Oases and is a project coming out of a collaboration involving Goethe Institute Georgia and the In-between Conditions platform.

It has been introduced as the maiden effort on the Georgian scene to integrate artwork and display into a digital space, and an effort to study "creative possibilities and boundaries of the web as a medium and a space in relation to existing territorial and global contexts."

Asking questions about creative role of individuals during a crisis, and behavioural patterns shaped by online interaction with pandemic information, the web exhibition presents works created during the self-isolation of the creatives in question.

[A]ll of the participant projects were created particularly for the web environment, representing search for new forms and methods in Georgian art domain," a summary for the online show noted.

Responding to questions caused by the "chain of changing circumstances that overwhelmed the world unexpectedly", Digital Oases was conceived during the lockdown and authored and curated by Khatia Tchokhonelidze, Vato Urushadze and Giorgi Spanderashvili.

It comes via the In-between Conditions platform, which hosted Post.Digital.Dreams, three parallel displays in the pre-pandemic physical space in Tbilisi in December.

In 2019 it became the first art platform from Georgia to link itself with Transmediale, a major annual festival of media art in Berlin and hosted the German event’s cinema curator Florian Wüst for a talk in Tbilisi. That followed their 2018 multimedia display at Tbilisi’s KHIDI underground club, bringing works by artists centred around a new “diversity of creative expression”.

Works by artists participating in Digital Oases can be viewed on the website created for the display.