At the bottom of the
coffee cup, future(s) and past(s) are interpreted through certain symbols that
are shaped while turning the coffee cup upside down. The mountain and the
meerkat, leveling each other out, is a metaphor for a symbol that appeared in
Thea’s coffee cup years ago. In 2007, inhabited by a geographical nostalgia the
artist did a series of small, fugitive works named future telling paintings.
It is told that in Batumi, Western Georgia, people turn the coffee cups they
drink daily, it became almost a ritual, a way of connecting to the near future
by reading symbols in the coffee cup. The animal that stands in Future telling,
facing the open mountain, in a seemingly obsolete and mysterious landscape,
translates the observation of one’s destiny that is yet to unfold. 

In Georgia, the Khvamli
or Khomli mountain has several historical caves, one in which Prometheus, the
titan god of fire, was punished. 

Maria Schumacher’s large
black and red painting creates a cavernous space or a fragment of a more figurative
Tetris game. She made it during the pandemic, where the symbol of the cave
chameleonically unearthed itself in many domestic environments. The ludic and
split lines of the painting, the Brâncusian shapes that almost exceed the red
grid of the canvas, the organic and uncontrolled contours permeate the everyday
breathing, body movement, and synchronization during paralyzed times. 

In Tzusoo’s Schrödinger’s Baby video
work, the concomitant possibility of space both digital and physical is
interrogated through the artist’s own female identity and her inner grappling
with the potential of motherhood. Similar to Schrodinger’s cat experiment,
whereby a cat entered a state of superposition (being alive and dead at the
same time), the artist poses the question of whether the digital world could
absorb the fixed entities of our physical bodies. Her desire as a woman to have
babies has always been interrupted by confinements that float around. And yet,
identity, skin colour, health issues, marital status, social status, are no
parameters in the digital realm. 

A
bear called Ung-nyô appears in the Korean creation myth called Tang-gun. In order to become human,
the bear carries out the mission of living on only mugwort and garlic for one
hundred days inside a cave. The tiger is unable to last one hundred days, but
the bear is able to endure it. The bear becomes human and marries a god’s son,
who descends from the sky, and gives birth to a son. Then she disappears from the
myth. In Korean mythology, women disappear after they give birth to sons. They
never appear again. The ultimate goal of their existence is to give birth to
sons. (Kim
Hyesoon part of Documenta 14)

Inorganic umbilical
cords hang from the ceiling as if the artwork becomes the baby, and the screen
its skin. The human realm is however intertwined here through the sound of the
video coming out of the artist’s belly and heart. If digital surrogate
motherhood existed, how would then the human responsibilities change and
expand? 

Falling star, the
abstract embodiment of a Georgian elderly woman as watermelon, is pieced
together with soviet glass, smalta called in Russian, used in the past for
mosaic murals. Despite the still patriarchal impression of the Georgian
culture, the woman identity is symbolically strong, and together with nature,
they are recurrent elements in Thea’s work. In this mosaic, there is pain and
beauty, mourning and living. And not only concerning human nature but also for
nature itself. The gown hanging on a headless hanger assembles flowers,
vegetables, and fruits, mirrored by two mulberries and spring onions, as well
as an 18th-century wooden vessel originally from Khvamli. This trinity is an hommage to
nature, culture, and history, and universal female intuition, said
the artist while sitting on the bench across the gallery space. 

Thea’s work also
highlights the collective trauma and environmental impact of the enduring
crimes of colonization or neoliberalism. Resisting herself the extractivist
industry in Georgia, especially the current plan of the largest hydroelectric
power station in the gorge of the Rioni River in Western Georgia, the artist
precisely returns to the environment in her practice to underline the ancestral
knowledge of nature and the cosmological and geological look into decolonized
futures. 

As the exhibition space
follows the conch shell shape, Never
Ending Ending opens up a portal for hybrid identities that
perform, on the canvas, alternative constructions of femininity and
masculinity. The lines and colours flow together in the fiction of real
life. 

Curatorial text by Cristina
Vasilescu

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THE CONCH SHELL is an exhibition produced in partnership with
Goethe-Institut Bucharest.