Marika Asatiani

* Doors imperceptibly ajar, 2024, an artist book/object, 24x16, 48 pages. The same image is repeated on all 48 pages. The work is also presented as 5 images of 29x21cm The work concerns conflicting feelings related to exploration of unknown, attaining new uncommon experience or knowledge. The photograph is made in an old waiting room of a railway station built in a village of Tsemi, Bordjomi region of Georgia by Tsarist Russia at the beginning of 20th century.

The artist book is made based on my site specific photographic installation from 2010. Because of its current relevance for me, I decided to reanimate the installation through a new medium. The work questions the existence of fixed center, fixed perspective, accepted common knowledge - it elevates and gives significance to a single view while simultaneously undermining its unique, authoritative character - presenting all the different perspectives simultaneously.

In between the screens, looped slide projection of eight images The work was made while flipping TV channels as fast as possible. It refers to a gap in between the constant stream of thoughts, images, projections, information.

The work was inspired by the movement of bright yellow curtain, glowing with warmth – it is an observation of the movement of air (which is unseen/intangible initself) through a perceivable object/material. The title - Huu, the sound of expelling breath, refers to several things: it is a healing sound in Chinese Qigong, and is associated with color yellow. In Egyptian mythology, the god Hu is the power of the spoken word, he personifies the authority of utterance.

Adam and Eve (Corroborating Evidence), 2020, Vol. 1, artist book/object, self-published, Den Haag, NL; there is a fingerprint of a different person on each page. The work humorously refers to the way humanity developed since the activation of the red apple in paradise. The apple on a book cover is of color blue as well as fingerprints -representing language, writing, and everything connected with mental/rational faculties of human beings.

Bags made out of paper, and a video projection, 3 sec loop. This work concerns the space, in which all changes happen, which serves as a container for multiplicity of possibilities; time, impressions, lived moments, wishes constantly accumulate in oneself.

The book is composed of empty pages apart from its middle – there are 6 photographs printed on the middle 4 pages of the book; The photos are staged/constructed – and represent documentation of performative actions. The work is concerned with reflective and pregnant stillness, suspension as a background to all activity.

The work concerns the act of perception and self-perception by means of looking at the outside object.

this installation refers to stories of displacement, movement, and accumulation of various narratives and memories of both personal and historical events, which has been made xed and manifested in certain patterns/marks left on the wallpapers in former Hotel Iveria, Tbilisi, Georgia. The hotel Iveria was one of the most luxu- rious Soviet hotels in Georgia, which was turned into a shelter for refugees from two wars in breakaway regions of Georgia, in the early 90s. Later on in 2009, it was converted it into a 5 star Radisson Blue chain hotel

The publication unfolds as a strip, placed inside the front/back cover with a title. The work concerns efforts to grasp, capture something, which is hard to pin down, which seems to be there but is ever elusive.

Black and Red, diptych, lambda prints, framed. The photographed pens are both black, while the title misleads. The work questions the power of labelling over human mind. We often don’t believe our own eyes, our senses and intuition, because we are told differently by ‘others’. Also, color red represents color of authority- ‘correction’.

The shelf, or rather former holder of shelves is photographed in the main Library of the Technical University of Tbilisi, Georgia. The library dates back to the Soviet times, when it was an active hub of information and knowledge. Currently, after falling into oblivion and disrepair for more than a decade, it is trying to assert its importance once again. The work deals with the concrete symbols of knowledge or absence thereof, while on a personal level, it deals with the feeling of void, and emptiness, which is puzzling/confusing to someone who is experiencing it.

The work explores the perception and feeling of the immediate surroundings in here and now, ideas of being and non being against the background of color green (with a reference to its use as a transparent color in film and TV industry)

The 5 photographs are made from 5 chairs that surround the table, e.i. from each perspective of an imaginary person, sitting at the round table. It is inspired by a photo of the Georgian statesmen sitting at a round table in a garden, (taken in 1921), discussing as to how to defend the country from the invasion by the Red Army.

In this work, consisting of 7 images, the same person is photographed from his back, as he undertakes walks in the hills surrounding the town. The back blocks the scenery from the viewer in such a way that it becomes hard to see what’s behind it. Subsequently, the gaze is turned back towards the viewer, creating a very subtle feeling of self-awareness, as if the person in photographs is looking at the viewer from different sides, and she/he is placed in the center.

11 currents of air, 2012, installation, plastic, fishwire, Project Probe, Internet project, Arnhem, Suze May Sho. The work is set up in accordance with the space it is pre- sented in; it concerns the paradox of stillness and movement, as well as to how changing a perspective affects human perception.