The contest for the best project of a monument to be erected on the exact place of the destroyed statue of Stalin has recently ended in Georgia. The country’s authorities say that this new monument will commemorate not only the victims of Stalin’s reign of terror, but also those who fell in the ‘new wave of aggressive Stalinism in 2008”. This idea appeared in 2010, immediately after the dismantling of the 12-meter-high monument to Stalin in his native town of Gori, located 29 km from the border with South Ossetia.
The authorities didn’t donate the 6-meter-high statue of Joseph Jughashvili to the local ‘Museum of the Soviet Occupation’, as they had promised. Perhaps they feared that Stalin’s followers, who still exist in the town, would demand the restoration of the monument.
42 projects were submitted to the contest in 2010, but the jury was able to choose the winner only this year: Tamarastudio (Paris) was awarded first prize for the project by Tamara Quesitadze and Paata Sanaj.
Some of the jury’s experts say that this project is the best, but it has certain shortcomings. Georgy Bugadze, member of the jury and rector of the Georgian Academy of Fine Arts told VK about these concerns and other matters concerning the new monument’s construction.
- How was the competition held?
- In the form of an exhibition. The first one, last year, was too close to a complete failure. The jury didn’t deem any of the works worthy. Personally, I think some of them were interesting. The second round was held last January. The majority of the jury voted for Tamara Questitadze’s project, even though it needs to further improvements. I hope the author will appreciate and follow our advice. I think that the new generation of Georgian sculptors is obliged to create something worthy on this site. The motto of Questitadze’s art group is very peculiar: “Do not yield to vanity”, it means they agree that each project should be worked through to perfection, to evolve in time retaining it’s intransitive meaning – Tamara said that herself. And that’s the main merit of this particular project.
- Could you tell us something about Tamara?
- She graduated from the Art Academy 30 years ago. She is a designer as well as a sculpture, she performed successfully at the Venice biennale and her kinetic sculpture work adorns Batumi. She has also held exhibitions in London and Paris. The project submitted to our contest is not kinetic, as we expected, it is composed of different materials. In contests like this, the jury always faces a hard choice: to choose a work of traditional sculpture or a modern conceptual one, but Tamara’s project managed to incorporate traits of both.
Georgy Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi, exclusively to VK.
