films
Deda ena
Multi-channel film-installation, 18’, 2023
Meggy Rustamova Adeishvili, who uses her Georgian name on the occasion of this installation, explores the relationship between individual and universal histories and memories. Combining text and image, her poetic film essays translate contemporary themes centred around linguistics, migration, identity and displacement.
The title of the film installation, Deda Ena, “mother tongue” in Georgian, refers to a children’s language book that was written by Iakob Gogebashvili in 1876. Guided by Rustamova Adeishvili’s copy of the book and the Georgian language that the artist had forgotten but relearned, she encounters people with diverse relationships to language and a sense of belonging.
Deda Ena begins with a personal and intimate memory of displacement. Set in the early 1950s, the memory ties into the Soviet Union’s history of forced deportation and resettlement of ethnic minorities, such as the Assyrian community that settled in Georgia in the aftermath of the First World War. Labelled anti-Soviet under Joseph Stalin’s rule, hundreds of Assyrian families, including Rustamova Adeishvili’s mother, were deported in goods trains to Kazakhstan where they remained in exile for many years.
Bang [Ding Dong]
HD film, 8 min, 2023
Bang [Ding Dong] is a short film of pared-down elements: Rustamova’s own class photograph from the early 1990s; her visits to the asylum seekers’ centre; and the photographs of their surroundings that the children made themselves. With great sensitivity, Rustamova employs photography, film and language to shed light on the daily experiences of young refugees.
Horaizon
HD film, 11 min, 2022
Horaizon is an experimental film moderating between photography, moving image and sound. The title is referring to the English phonetic pronunciation of the world horizon. The film is shot in different locations throughout the world. The horizons, sunsets and weather conditions between these places form the common thread throughout the film. In Horaizon tourists travel through international borders, searching for sublime landscapes, but by doing so inevitably destroy nature.
Excerpt from Horaizon
Babel
HD video, 8', 2019
Everything begins on a fixed shot of a middle-aged lady, serious, thoughtful. She tries hard to remember some words from a language unfamiliar to our ears, her native language: Assyrian. Like the origin of the mythical city of Babel, this neo-Aramaic language was born in ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of humanity (present-day Iraq). Simple words (numbers, days, expressions,...) reappear from the bottom of the ages; they emerge little by little memories of Juliette Rustamova which one understands later that she is the mother of the artist. The subject of the film, which initially evokes a loss of memory linked to old age, gradually changes in favour of memories: shared moments of childhood, moments of joy and pride related to a language that is transmitted intuitively.
The Assyrian is like other Aramaic languages, threatened with extinction despite the existence of many Christians from Syria, Iran and Iraq who still practice it and who have migrated to Armenia and Georgia, the homeland of the artist. Language is the link to these religious communities, an inheritance both individual and collective. Hence the importance of the transmission and translation of an endangered language in a minority context. Like all life that passes, this film questions the irremediable loss of wealth fallen into oblivion and the family heritage and ancestral we must preserve. (Text: Catherine Henkinet, Iselp, 2019)
Light displacement
HD video, '4', 2018
The starting point for this film were the many attempts to photograph a tree in Hiroshima, Japan. Aspects of war, escapism and fear are expressed in this audio-visual trip. The atomic bomb in Japan and the current nuclear threat between the US and North Korea is translated into the white, overexposed photographs, which fade into complete 'white-out' in the film. Although this place is loaded by the history of the bomb, this gesture of capturing a simple tree is an expression to the reconstruction and modernisation of a once demolished place.
In sync this lonesome tree could be standing anywhere, whether it's in Brussels, London or Paris. Simultaneously the repeated efforts of capturing the tree as it naturally looks – with the beautiful sunlight and the variety of green colours – expresses the impossibility of perfectly capturing reality in a photograph. One can read this film as a politicisation of aesthetics, where beauty is harmonised with truth.
L'invitation au voyage
HD video, 12'50", 2014
Meggy Rustamova’s film Invitation to the voyage / L’invitation au voyage (2014), which derives its title from a poem by Baudelaire, is a suggestive examination of the potential of photography to tell stories (or history) and to let fact and fiction move closer together until the fuzziness of the pixels creating each photo has also taken hold of the narrative. Yellow Post-Its on selected photos promise a clarifying designation, but the words written in pencil have been erased and the path back to the time when the notes were made is now obstructed. It is the camera that guides us through the life story of the woman – her childhood, her studies, and her relationships. It zooms in on the photographs until the picture becomes grainy, focuses on details and navigates between the materiality of the photographs themselves and the content that they communicate. But are these really documents of a lived past, coherent images that add up to recount a biography? Or is it exactly these individual and simultaneously universal aspects that inevitably make them witnesses to a story that could even be completely invented? Is the spoken text a parallel narrative moving along visual coordinates or is it an autonomous level that is simply being superimposed on the images?
Nothing of what is said can be read directly in the pictures themselves. The text behaves more like a transparent sheet placed over the individual photos. The picture is still there but its sharpness is reduced in favor of the context in which it appears. The process that Roland Barthes called the ‘studium’ – the cognizant approach to a photograph that is able to extract cultural and socio-historical meaning from the image and as part of this cultural perception allows the information stored in the image to find its way into one’s consciousness – is still valid. Otherwise we would not be convinced that we could find traces of the spoken text in the pictures. But what Barthes regards as the decisive noeme of photography, the ‘that-has-been’ of an unalterable link to the past, gradually dissolves during the imaginative journey into this particular past. (Text: Vanessa Joan Müller, Kunsthalle Wien, 2014)
(dis)Location,
Video, 11'45”, 2013
(dis)Location is an essay film on photography and storytelling. The film consist of pictures taken from a guide book to the city of Tbilisi, Georgia and made up memories which are constructed in slowly moving images.
'M.A.M. (My Assyrian Mother)' is a double portrait of mother and daughter. The short film starts as a silent portrayal of two similarly dressed woman, obviously related, and differenced in age. Suddenly a discussion develops about the framing and the positioning in the setting. The camera continues filming, while the artist realises that not the departing idea is important (a silent double portrait), but what arises from this new conversation.
This performance is central to how we understand facets of identity such as gender, race, and ethnicity. People alter their bodies, hair, and clothing to align with or rebel against social conventions and to express messages to others around them. Here gender and nationality is explored through representations of the body in the creative process. This film is depicting an universal parent-child relationship, in this case a mother-daughter conversation, in a playful almost comic way, which is understood universally.
