Charlie Fox, Helena Bryant, Mark McGowan, David Collins, Rachael House, Jo David

PAVILION

This project announced “six artists bound from London, 10 days, one Caucasian Capital, a large tent; all to create a UK Pavilion (of sorts).”
What might have appeared as an ostensibly nationalistic outpost within the heart of the Art Caucasus 2007 was in fact an entirely fragile and shambolic encampment. Some bunting, a banner, some hastily arranged signposts, perched within Pushkin Square – itself an annex of the grandly renamed Freedom Square (formerly Lenin Square) with its brushed up history and newly appointed street furniture .
A collection of artists – Helena Bryant, David Collins, Jo David, Charlie Fox, Rachael House and Mark McGowan displaying a range of artistic practices – from the gently enticing to the intimate, from the playful to the provocative ; Coalescing around the deceptively simple gesture of a ‘Free Tea Stop in Freedom Square’ - Tea making for the inhabitants of Tbilisi, the workers, the itinerants, and passersby, a cross-section of the population of a new European Democracy. The Caucasus, and particularly Georgia famed for its hospitality and cosmopolitanism was being subjected to a reverse exchange. “International” Artists airlifted to central Tbilisi – welcome please – we bring not only gifts of ‘English Tea’ but parcels of cultural wisdom and sophistication.
But this reversed exchange is turned inside out in a web of provisional, chance and prearranged meetings: intimate and vulnerable, genuine and faked, disguised and unmasked, everyday and extraordinary. Not only is the exchange an attempt at dialogue across these forceful boundaries, it is a dance made from the millions of permutations allowed within human interaction. A chance to break the boundaries and transform the space of dialogue; fragments, a drawing, a phrase, a word, that meeting, collide and resonates. Nothing secure here, but the fact that this space opened out might expand and keep expanding in a net of associations and connections.

Free tea on the Freedom Square

But what can a bunch of “English” artists give the people of Tbilisi? Was it how to read, to consume, to engage in, even to savour this ‘new art’. This project, if it achieved anything, was to puncture the false boundaries between artist and audience, sometimes quietly, other times forcibly. Unashamed of its simple gaucheness in a mischievous pleasure in blurring categories; asking whose culture is being displayed, how it might appear and perform, or simply for whom this cultural exchange was produced?

Counterproductions 2007

Publicity for project – see www.counterproductions.co.uk projects.
The square recently renamed and joined toward the airport by George Bush Avenue.
See these links for more information on artists work www.peckhampet-tastic.com , www.counterproductions.co.uk, www.helenabryant.co.uk, www.markmcgowan.org, www.spacestationsixtyfive.com