Savle Shubladze
Exchange Program
Museumsquartier & Culture Department, Austrian Foreign Ministry
September 2023 - October 2023
Vienna, Austria
September 2023 - October 2023
Vienna, Austria
Savle Shubladze (born 1997, Tbilisi, Georgia) holds a bachelor's degree in Ecology from Ilia State University in Tbilisi (2020) and has been studying in the Bachelor's program for Fine Arts at the Free University of Tbilisi, School of Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design (VA[A]DS) since 2021. He was a scholarship recipient of the Ria Keburia A-i-R program (Georgia) and participated in the TAF (Tbilisi Art Fair) in 2022.
Savle Shubladze's work focuses on themes of ecology, the relationship between humans and nature, injury, illness, and healing. The artist often uses site-specific situations or found objects and their histories as starting points for his artistic practice. He works with various media and representational strategies, creating installations as well as employing photography and sculpture.
“Nocturnal Wetting” exhibition in the MQ Pop-Up Schauraum
Savle Shubladze immerses himself in a research process that revolves around the observation and exploration of the external environment, which can be described as a form of "passive search". With a specific intention that focuses on the topic of disease, the project goes beyond mere observation and gives the discovered spaces and objects a new meaning. The artist conducts field work, collects and searches for data about the state of the forest environment. This search process will be interwoven with its main interest in the hidden and invisible inhabitants of the forest ecosystem.
Nocturnal Wetting, in German "Nächtliches Einnessen" is the title of MQ Artist-in-Residence Savle Shubladze's current exhibition in the MQ Pop-Up Schauraum.
The artist deals with illness and healing and their partly reluctant references to man and nature.
The views of Savle Shubladze are shaped by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich (Austro-American doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, 1897 - 1957) who thought that they are unspoken traumas stored in the body that then eventually turn into diseases.
One of his best-known works so far is the photograph of a standing brand covered with salt in the middle of a piece of forest destroyed by fire, which the artist found in Georgia and made the subject of his work. Salt plays a role in humans as a remedy, but for the plant it is dehydratingly destructive. Savle Shubladze associates with this recording about the immediate situation something that should occupy him in many of his other photographic works, an invisible disease, loneliness.
Another central element of the exhibition are dead insects collected by the artist during his residency at the MQ. Their excretions are important nutrients for plants, on the other hand, insects utilize disease-infested trees, eliminate dead wood. Climate change, pesticides, uncontrolled fires cause a decline in the insect population
Savle Shubladze's work focuses on themes of ecology, the relationship between humans and nature, injury, illness, and healing. The artist often uses site-specific situations or found objects and their histories as starting points for his artistic practice. He works with various media and representational strategies, creating installations as well as employing photography and sculpture.
“Nocturnal Wetting” exhibition in the MQ Pop-Up Schauraum
Savle Shubladze immerses himself in a research process that revolves around the observation and exploration of the external environment, which can be described as a form of "passive search". With a specific intention that focuses on the topic of disease, the project goes beyond mere observation and gives the discovered spaces and objects a new meaning. The artist conducts field work, collects and searches for data about the state of the forest environment. This search process will be interwoven with its main interest in the hidden and invisible inhabitants of the forest ecosystem.
Nocturnal Wetting, in German "Nächtliches Einnessen" is the title of MQ Artist-in-Residence Savle Shubladze's current exhibition in the MQ Pop-Up Schauraum.
The artist deals with illness and healing and their partly reluctant references to man and nature.
The views of Savle Shubladze are shaped by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich (Austro-American doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, 1897 - 1957) who thought that they are unspoken traumas stored in the body that then eventually turn into diseases.
One of his best-known works so far is the photograph of a standing brand covered with salt in the middle of a piece of forest destroyed by fire, which the artist found in Georgia and made the subject of his work. Salt plays a role in humans as a remedy, but for the plant it is dehydratingly destructive. Savle Shubladze associates with this recording about the immediate situation something that should occupy him in many of his other photographic works, an invisible disease, loneliness.
Another central element of the exhibition are dead insects collected by the artist during his residency at the MQ. Their excretions are important nutrients for plants, on the other hand, insects utilize disease-infested trees, eliminate dead wood. Climate change, pesticides, uncontrolled fires cause a decline in the insect population
