Het Vijfde Seizoen

Lado Darakhvelidze

Winter 2016

Lado Darakhvelidze (Georgia / Netherlands) worked in Het Vijfde Seizoen from January up to and including March 2016. Accompanied by students from ArtEZ, School of the Arts Arnhem he is realized a project in which he deployed daily newspapers for personal news coverage about psychiatry.

Darakhvelidze (1977 Kutaisi, Georgia) focuses on the transmission of information and on media and their social-political impact. He zooms in on social and political changes and represents these in personal stories.

In Het Vijfde Seizoen he worked on the project Transmission, a community based project in which students of Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Arnhem and patients commented on the news.

For Transmission Darakhvelidze erased information from national newspapers and invited patients to give new content to the news by filling the gaps with personal texts and drawings. Every day he brought recent newspapers to the different therapeutical wards. Wider social reality is brought into the relatively closed community of the institute by bringing these newspapers.

Economics, politics, art and sports are subjects that everybody recognizes. By erasing the textual content, only the headlines, the lead and the photos remain. The oneliners can be interpreted in various ways and evoke different views and fantasies of the patients. Patients shared their reality and perspective on society by replacing the erased content by drawings, comments and fictional stories. In this way the newspaper becomes a personalized selfmade paper.  

Darakhvelidze has worked as a teacher at ArtEZ since 2014. During his residency he supervised fifteen students of the department of Fine Art at Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Arnhem (ArtEZ). The students worked in Het Vijfde Seizoen several days a week for two months and made individual contributions to Transmission. Art historian Annick Fournier, who also works at ArtEz as a teacher, supervises the process from a theoretical and scientific perspective. 

In previous work Lado Darakhvelidzereflected on changes and physical removal of national symbols in post communist countries. He extends the political to give content to mythology, history and stories. Darakhvelidze lives and works in Arnhem. Darakhvelidze’s work was presented among others at the 11th Biennale of Istanbul (2009), Biennale Cuvee, Linz (2010), The Kitchen / CEC Artslink New York One Big City (2013) and  Manifesta 10, Sint-Petersburg (2014). In 2012 Darakhvelidze joined the Artist Pension Trust.

www.ladodarakhvelidze.com

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