The presentation of the “Alternative Kutaisi” project was held in Kutaisi, implemented by the Urban Art organization with funding from the European Union program #EU4Culture, in partnership with the Ketar Foundation and ELECTRONAUTS.
The complex project had four main goals:
– Researching and collecting the underground art of 1990s Kutaisi;
– Creating an alternative tourist-educational route for Kutaisi;
– Shooting a full-length documentary about the same period.
As part of the project, the tourist-educational route material, prepared by Kettari Academy in cooperation with Urban Art, was donated to DMO Imereti for inclusion in the city’s tourism scheme.
An exhibition of the collected works was opened at the Davit Kakabadze Kutaisi Fine Arts Gallery, where video, audio, and photo documentary material, personal belongings of musicians and artists, and hand-painted t-shirts/installations by the artist Lia Ukleba were presented.
It should be noted that the musical traditions and artistic movements in 1990s Kutaisi had a significant impact on the positioning of Georgia in the modern art scene of Eastern Europe.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Kutaisi became a center of alternative, underground music, which included alternative poetry, fashion, visual arts, punk subculture, and modern ideology. It was a youthful, alternative reaction to the socio-economic landscape in post-Soviet Georgia, specifically in 1990s Kutaisi.