Koka Ramishvili
Koka Ramishvili was born in 1956 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lives in Geneva. After studying film and industrial design at the Academy of Art and Architecture, Tbilisi (1975–1980), he turned to photography and later expanded his practice to video, installation, drawing, and painting. His work interrogates the boundaries between document and image, and the phenomenology of perception. He has exhibited at Tate Modern, MAMCO Geneva, the Goethe Institut Berlin, Musée des Beaux-Arts Nantes, the Museum Folkwang Essen, the M KHA Antwerp, the Cobra Museum Amsterdam, and represented Georgia at the Venice Biennale (2009).
WAR FROM MY WINDOW
1991–1992
black-and-white photo on paper
Collection of M HKA / Flemish Community
War from My Window was created during the short but bloody civil war in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, which began later the same year as independence. Over the days of the conflict (22 December 1991 – 6 January 1992), which the artist recalls overlapping with the twelve days of Christmas, Ramishvili took a daily photograph from the window of his mother’s flat, the camera facing the government headquarters in the city center as the government of Zviad Gamsakhurdia was being overthrown. The resulting set of 12 black-and-white photographs document smoke bellowing each day from central Tbilisi, yet curiously the mood of the photos is calm, creating an alienating inner contrast. Ramishvili noted how as combat was raging, shops, cafés and cinemas remained open, people went to work, and life for most part carried on in everyday normality. From an artist analyzing the new post-Soviet condition, War from My Window acts as a visual metaphor for the uncanny coexistence of civilian life along with war violence.