Gallery Artbeat presents Tamo Jugeli and Nina Kintsurashvili's group exhibition, 'Limen'.

Limen is a shopping mall at 4 am.
Limen is a school playground on a Sunday afternoon.
Limen is a Tbilisi bazaar during peak pandemic.
Limen is a waiting room.
Limen is a bus stop in January.
Limen is a disinfecting door mat.
Limen is a construction site.
Limen is a wind before it starts blowing.
Limen is a Zoo.
Limen is rain before it becomes flood.

Limen brings together the works of two young Georgian artists, Nina Kintsurashvili and Tamo Jugeli, in their first museum two-woman show that explores the concept of liminality from individual perspectives of the artists. The notion of a liminal spaces, is applied both to physical as well as imaginary spaces, where a solid, reductionist state of an identity is questioned and transitional / ambivalent conditions are put forward. This sometimes includes existing on the threshold of rational and irrational, organic and sterile, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic and etc.

Both artists, nearly the same age as Georgian independence itself, grew up in times of uncertainty, transformation and the search for collective cultural identity, all while the country was transitioning from Russian and later Soviet colonialism to an independent nation. Navigating this eclectic environment full of cultural paradoxes and mix’n’match, Georgian youth developed a new visual language based on codes prevalent in everyday life that borrowed from Western animation and pop, Orthodox culture, 'Second-hand capitalism' and the remnants of the Soviet propaganda.

The exhibition is a deconstruction of an absurdist sacred space, where various codes from the collective subconscious have left their mark and where displaced objects from an unknown architectural space are awaiting their final destination.

Acceptance of liminality, is an attempt at moving away from the pathos of uniquely authentic and solid identity. The aesthetic known as a Liminal Space is a location which is a transition between two other locations, or states of being. Typically these are abandoned, and oftentimes empty - a mall at 4am or a school hallway during summer, for example.

Tamo Jugeli is a young Georgian artist born in 1994. During 2013-2017 she studied Journalism at David Aghmashenebeli University of Georgia and only started painting after. Soon she became mentored by internationally renowned artist and writer, Gia Edzgveradze.

Paintings of Tamo Jugeli carry traces of unconscious impulses by its linear as well as color factures. An intuitive flow composed of simple elements of figures, colors and forms create complex and dynamic networks, which sometimes are transformed into shapes and sometimes are broken into abstractive signs. Each element stands on the frontier of a figurative or a plane deconstruction. Visual signs establish sculptural, fluid, spatial dimensions and attain their autonomy. We are witnesses to a game between transgration and sublimation, between the rational and the irrational.

Presented artworks, which have their own scale, space and limitless desire to break the boundaries can easily be read as topographic maps of brisk and irrational motion.

Nina Kintsurashvili is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia in 1992. She earned her BFA in painting from The Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and MFA in Intermedia from The University of Iowa, where she also taught undergraduate courses.

Using painting and drawing as anchors, Nina moves across the genres such as video , sound, printed media, performance and sculpture. Her work is an abstract deconstruction and reflection on gender, theology and mysticism,censorship cultural paradoxes and material cultural heritage. She works with the images ingrained in the collective subconscious and transports them into neutral, sterile spaces where they are re-examined, re-evaluated and re-arranged. During the process Nina explores an idea of excavating the patriarchal past and reimagining it with a fictional narratives, where the female figure is reclaiming the lost space in the creation of the history and the cultural heritage of the country. Other than her four solo shows, Nina has taken part in a number of group exhibitions. Among others, her work has been exhibited in Tate Modern as part of Future Late show curated by Tate Collective, Chicago Wetpaint Biennial in Zhou B Gallery, Ortega Y Gasset Projects in New York City and PS1 Iowa City.

All images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Gallery Artbeat