Wato Tsereteli | Creativity as a Profession – Potential in Social Settings.
Lecture within the framework of "Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts", an exhibition as part of a transdiciplinary research project, funded by the WWTF / Art(s)&Sciences-Call; 2009. Address by Andrea B. Braidt, Vice-Rector for Art and Research.
"The Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) – Tbilisi could be an example that artists can administrate and
run relatively complex initiatives and affect social architecture. But the main stress in regarding this project
should be on the potential of participation of artists in all fields of society. Art can be basically about everything
and incorporate everything re-shaped into the art context. Everybody is creative, but the artist's profession
is creativity, so does not have professional creativity a potential in changing the social setting?"
Since 2000, Wato Tsereteli, Georgian artist, curator and activist, together with a group of
(generationally, disciplinary) heterogenious cultural workers has been setting up several
independent discoursive and educational contexts in Tbilisi in the form of a long-term social performance.
All of these structural settings were legal, but unaccredited.
In fall 2010 the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) – Tbilisi started as a new initiative in this context.
At that point this independent institution was more "alternative" than any off-space or underground gallery
in the region, as in Georgia as a post-soviet country there nearly do not exist social models between
state institutions and individual citizens. Shortly, there is state and underground.
The talk will extend a presentation of the CCA's activities and formation history to an outlook on the
upcoming project "Offside Effect", in which the center's Informal Master Program, a long term educational module,
is contextualized in international case models of art education, that oppose state attempts of normalisation.
Wato Tsereteli
is an artist/ photographer/curator and creative administrator; he studied film in Tbilisi and
obtained an MA from the department of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (Belgium).
His artistic works are 2/3/4 dimensional objects with well structured spatial organization in/of them.
Wato Tsereteli initiated the Caucasian Center of Cultural Development (Media Art Farm/Institute of Photography and New Media)
and Cumbo group (free artist run space). He curated and took part in numerous art exhibitions in Georgia and abroad,
e.g. APPENDIX, Venice Biennales 2009 and 2011. Recently he established Georgia's first Center of Contemporary Art.
The center serves as education, research and exhibition platform for artists and art professionals. ( http://www.cca.ge/ )