We met Kutaisi-born artist and filmmaker Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze to talk about his recent work MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE, which was created in collaboration with Hito Steyerl and Miloš Trakilović for Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in Berlin. The lecture-performance places luxury fashion brand Balenciaga at the centre of a reflection on political and cultural developments in Europe after the fall of the iron curtain. And the question: who is catching up with whom?

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How did it come to the collaboration with Hito Steyerl and Miloš Trakilović?

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Miloš Trakilović and I studied together in Hito’s class at UDK and in different ways we were both assisting in her productions. At the moment Miloš and I are sharing a Studio where we also run a small bar. At dot.comm bar, we invite guests once in a while and we started with Hito Steyerl and Boris Buden. We had been talking about post ’89 era, the collapse of the Soviet Union, post-Yugoslav conflicts and fall of the Berlin wall and how those events paved the way to the current political and economic conditions. The condition in which fashion brands like Balenciaga and Vetements retroactively source and capitalize the aesthetics that have been generated by the collapse of economic systems. After this conversation, we started thinking of working together and giving it a form of lecture-performance. Soon after, Hito offered us to produce it together for her current solo show at nbk.

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Nowadays it seems like art loves fashion and fashion loves art like never before …

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Since I am not an expert on fashion I can not speak of historic facts but I can talk about things that I see and observe around me. An interesting point is how these two disciplines source from each other's tactics. And this fusion is being institutionally supported. 

For example, art exhibitions and performances more and more turned into fashion shows. Social gatherings in an art context become a catwalk where fashion skills like representing yourself are rather more important than the work you do. 

Those self-rebranding skills do not only apply to physical spaces but rather more on the representation of self-image in social media. Their marriage is so solid that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish their practices. 

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Is it interesting for you to draw a line between the two fields?

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Even though lately they have been crossing each other's way more often, for me there is a fundamental difference between those disciplines. Fashion is a commercially driven discipline that designs a body to separate it from other bodies, emphasizing its social status.

That can not be a case of art practice. It should not separate bodies but build a common ground instead.

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Why did you build your lecture-performance around the brand Balenciaga?

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

As we have decisively repeated it several times in the lecture: this work is not about Balenciaga as a fashion brand! But it is about Balenciaga as an ultimate method of privatization. This method does not actually create but curates already existing resources. It captures, accumulates, commodifies and privatizes the ‘unprivatizeable’. 

This brand’s aesthetics are very much rooted in post-1989 time. Besides the very important fact that it is vividly sourcing the aesthetic from the poverty following the collapse of the Soviet politics and economy, it is basically an optimized version of privatization wave that hit Post-Soviet states.

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Could you elaborate a bit more on the process of privatization in Post-Soviet countries?

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union a new class appeared, the so-called New Russians, New Georgians and so on. This oligarchy system was created based on the total privatization of the public sphere and natural resources. 

This process generated the drastic growth of the gap between the rich and the poor, which led to a certain kind of aesthetics in the lower class that was representing the poverty and hopelessness of the fallen class. 

This is the aesthetics which later has been picked up and privatized by those luxury brands.

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Another aspect I found very interesting in Mission Accomplished: Belanciege is the idea of being on a loop and trying to keep up. Would you say that in Post-Soviet countries, let’s take your home country Georgia, the tendency to keep up with the West is still so strong?

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Being on a loop is a constant mood of catching up with the standards which are imposed by others. A standard that was supposed to guarantee a better way of living, easy way of solving problems and dealing with existing challenges. This is the reality where Georgia found itself. Most of these kinds of standards are coming from the West. The feeling of affiliation towards Europe is strong in Georgia. Standardization of life there is referring to Western-European countries. 

So, it is always seen as a question of keeping up. But if we are on a loop it might not be clear what direction we are heading, or whether we are ahead or not. And indeed, we found ourselves ahead in privatization and oligo-kleptocracy.

If there are certain things in European countries kept national - we just went beyond it.

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Let’s talk about the cultural sphere. I have the impression that there is a tendency among artists in former Soviet states not being interested anymore in „keeping up with the West“ but in doing something that by no means is copying Western cultural tendencies.

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

In the case of Georgia, there is nothing more regressive than so-called liberal “alternative”, “progressive” dominant cultural class. The class that religiously treating the free-market economy and viciously instrumentalizes ambiguous notions such as freedom, alternative, identity and so on. Those words have been massively dominated and fetishized by the liberal discourse which has always been a very strong policy of the country after Soviet.

So-called “alternative” culture has very much placed and formed itself in this dominant neoliberal framework - which barely leaves space for real critical alternative perspectives.

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You are living in Berlin for 10 years now. Did you have or do you still have this feeling of catching up? 

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

Definitely. I did. The reason why I came here was to study and understand this culture I was following remotely. The main idea of being a student here was to understand how things function in Europe. I believe I was catching up. 

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Do have the feeling that as an artist coming from Georgia you are supposed to deal with certain topics that relate to your ethnic background?

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

No. Probably there are some expectations such as wrapping up the ethnic drama for the western eye and sell it to a certain segment of the art market. But I try to ignore them and think about my art practice how it should operate in a global context.

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Nevertheless, in your artistic practice, you deal with where you are coming from. Let’s take the work The invisible hand of my father where, in short, you tell the story of your father going to the West for work, losing his arm on the job in Portugal and coming back home again.

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

My father was part of the massive labour movement which resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union. He emigrated to Western Europe, trying to find a job to support his family. 

There is this body of my father who lived in both, Soviet and capitalist times. This body carries all that information and functions as a kind of map of these two different political and economic systems.

I had no artistic interest with only showing my fathers personal drama but rather I think that this particular story has potential if analyzing it properly it could bring us to the angle from where we could view a global picture of the present time.  

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze (1983, Kutaisi, Georgia) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, continued his studies at KABK in The Hague and received his Meisterschüler Diploma in the New Media class of Hito Steyerl at the University of Arts in Berlin in 2016. His work is focused on the moving image, the politics of its production, distribution and circulation. It centers on the architecture of the social body: economic conditions of its construction, the political nature of its transmission, and the set of aesthetical relations therein. Gagoshidze participated in numerous shows in Europe and beyond. Recent exhibitions:  n.b.k / Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE, Berlin;  steirischer herbst ‘19: Grand Hotel Abyss, Graz;  ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture, Athens;  Transacciones Informales / Cinemateka, Bogotá.