Levani's Room: HOME
Levani's Room: AMERICA (“I STAND AT THE window of this great house [...] as night falls. The night that is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. […] My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into the darker past.”), 2020
Referencing James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) – a seminal book in the history of queer literature, it is a love story between two men, that begins and ends in a rented room. Within this space, David -a white American - tells his story all the while looking at a reflection of himself in the window.
As the opening paragraph makes it clear, the book is as much about the denial of the right to love, as it is about race, colonial history and guilt, class inequality, and privilege. “Giovanni’s Room” is also the first queer story I read in which I could relate to the protagonist’s fears, and to the personal struggle with imposed cultural structures. After my journey in Argentina first, and now in New York, where I can finally claim a room in Bushwick as my home, I start to tell my story of becoming, told through the reflections of my culture, history, and experiences. A real-size print of my room on a sheer fabric will become the setting for most of the presentations - “Rooms,” that will entail exhibitions, performances, podcast, communal dinners, and raves. It will culminate in an all-encompassing artist book and an online archive.
Levan Mindiashvili
My trans-disciplinary art practice looks at culture as a primary catalyst for social change.
I create environments and immersive installations that, in pre-COVID times, morphed into extensive social sculptures where communal events such as dinners and dance parties occurred. In doing so, I question canonical truths, emphasizing identity-construction, representation, and archive. These installations are modular steel structures and serve as self-sustained display systems for paintings, tapestries, curtains, objects, and neons. As the pandemic made impossible communal, shared experiences, my focus has shifted to art-making as a form of knowledge production and sharing. I am committed to delinking from universalized (western) forms and norms of looking, interpreting, and representing the world. In the process of transitioning from a normative understanding of myself as a gay man with a Georgian upbringing, I embrace myself as a queer person from Eurasia while questioning my place and role in a globalized world.
Queerness, behavioral patterns, intersectionality, language, and ecology encompass my current frameworks. Through these lenses, I revisit the most intimate settings of my childhood—the rooms with heavily patterned wallpapers and tiles where my earliest traumas took place, and my consciousness was formed. As opposed to "illustration," I use "embodiment" as a primary creative strategy. I create "rooms" as psychological tableaus that can be experienced as two-dimensional images, environments, public sculptures, and VR installations. Personal and historical memory and trauma thus collapse into an experience through which the self may be healed and re-constituted.
Every new step in my practice starts with exploring non-artistic materials and techniques that, to my understanding, most precisely embody concerns I'm interested in. Throughout the past five years, I have addressed the idea of fluidity and the impossibility of capturing the now by experimenting with industrial paint (liquid mirror) as means of transforming images into reflective surfaces. Currently, my conceptual focus is on microbiological and psychological foundations of the human mind, the modular nature of our behavioral patterns, and all living organisms' interconnectivity. To address these topics, I have begun to explore natural latex, which is widely used for clinical and erotic- purposes, and various metal paper sheets as foundations for imagery. Modular and repetitive, these images are inspired by the Georgian alphabet and my childhood floral patterns and are transferred through monotype and screen-printing.