There is no concept for “Tbilisi 2. Wednesday Calls the Future,” but the never-ending love for language--or, as Marcel Proust once put it: „Good books are written in foreign languages.“ It started last year with the exhibition „Tuesday Is Gone“ (http://www.tuesdayisgone.com) and the collaboration between Art Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory (AIRL) based in Tbilisi, a group of artists, and Daniel Baumann (supported by Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland and others)

„Tbilisi 2. Wednesday Calls the Future“ is part two of this ongoing collaboration. Artworks, films, and exhibitions produce discussions, insights and beauty. For instance the debate launched by Nana Kipiani of AIRL: Western art presents, Georgian post-soviet art represents. Is this true? If yes, what are the historical developments behind this difference? Is the language of minimal art typically western? Is it the product of an international culture, its market and search for efficiency? What happened to the theatrical gesture? What is its function today? Why use it? Why re-use it? Or is it all clichés?

Tbilisi knew early modernism, the so-called „Tbilisi Modernism“ between the 1910s and 1920s. At that time, the capital of Georgia lived a multinational cultural reality, which, after the invasion by Red Russia and the subsequent sovietisation, was forbidden and repressed as „bourgeois and formalist“. Part of the emigrants and the intelligence left the country, the other part was repressed, arrested or exterminated.

In the 1960s, because of tourism, agriculture and high industry, Georgia became one of the richest republics of Soviet Union. Its collapse at the end of the 1980s brought years of great instability, economic break down, corruption and poverty. The „Rose Revolution“ of November 2003 installed new hope. Today, Georgia’s significance in an international context is of geopolitical nature: One of the oldest European Christian countries, it is surrounded by Muslim countries. It takes a few hours to get to Iran, Turkey or the Caucasian republics.

Despite of its cultural heritage, Tbilisi lacks of contemporary culture and art: no contemporary art museums, no interesting art magazines, only a few galleries, no collectors, nor patrons or other financial support.

If there is no concept, there is the future: part 3 takes place in 2006 and will be entitled „Let’s Stay Alive Till Monday“.