Not to Speak is to Speak, a new photography exhibition coordinated by an American Fulbright Fellow in Georgia, explores the lives of ordinary Georgian women through images.
Ten ordinary Georgian women ranging in age from 17 to 55 and from different regions of the country were brought together under the project to explore Georgian culture from their unique, personal perspectives. Nine of the women chose photography as their medium.
The project is supported by the US Embassy and Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA).
At the exhibition opening on Wednesday evening, Julius Cai, the Cultural Attaché of the US Embassy to Georgia, applauded the project director, Misty Brodiaea Springer, for bringing these women together. Cai said that the United States and Springer share a vision for an inclusive Georgian society along gender lines. Cultural exchange, or “people-to-people exchange,” as Cai called it, “achieves things impossible to achieve in other spheres.”
“The essence of intercultural education is the acquisition of empathy—the ability to see the world as others see it, and to allow for the possibility that others may see something we have failed to see, or may see it more accurately,” Cai said, quoting US Senator James William Fulbright, who created the Fulbright Program in 1946.
Springer came to Georgia initially in 2017 to conduct research on human trafficking as part of her master’s program in the United States. She returned to Georgia as a Fulbright Fellow for 2018-2019, and is currently working on an ethnography about food and women’s relationship to food, which she plans to turn into a book. Through various connections, she was introduced to local Georgian women across the country and was invited into their homes to learn how to cook traditional dishes. Talking with these women over their kitchen tables, Springer established personal connections with them and was subsequently introduced individually to the women who later participated in the photography project.
The photographs, some 27 of them, are arranged in several groupings; the photographs in each grouping seek to answer a prompt provided by Springer. The prompts took the form of questions: “How do you see yourself?”; “What makes you angry? What does your anger look like?”; “As a woman, what do you feel excluded from?”, and several more. The names of the photographers are not attached to their works, as some women may not have felt safe otherwise, Springer explained.
The photographs in the exhibition examine “the razor’s edge between modernity and what [the photographers’] mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives looked like,” Springer told GEORGIA TODAY. One black-and-white photograph, taken by Keti Tushmalishvili from the western region of Guria, depicts the photographer, a young, modern women educated abroad, standing in the living room of her family home. She is surrounded by antique furniture, old photographs and religious icons; a massive traditional carpet hangs on the wall, looming. The subject faces an empty cradle, a potential foreshadowing of her future role as mother and wife.
Another photograph answering the question, “What makes you angry?”, depicts a woman in the process of dressing, her naked shoulder exposed, as she is being photographed with a cellphone camera through her bedroom window. The photographer, Ia Tchelidze, told GEORGIA TODAY that the photograph was inspired by her feeling that, “in Georgia, everyone is watching you.”
The exhibition is open to public from May 9 to 14 at the Moxy Hotel on Saarbrucken Square in Tbilisi.
By Lucy Papachristou