Savle Shubladze: Nocturnal Wetting

Opening: Wed 13.09., 18h

Nocturnal Wetting is the title of MQ Artist-in-Residence Savle Shubladze's current exhibition at the MQ Pop-Up Schauraum.
The artist explores illness and healing and their sometimes conflicting relationships to humanity and nature.
Savle Shubladze's views are influenced by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich (Austro-American physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, 1897 - 1957) who believed that it is unexpressed traumas stored in the body that eventually turn into illnesses.

One of his most famous works to date is the photograph of a standing branch covered with salt in the middle of a forest destroyed by fire, which the artist found in Georgia and made the subject of his work. Salt plays a role in humans as a healing agent, but for plants it is dehydratingly destructive. Savle Shubladze associates with this shot about the immediate situation something that would preoccupy him in many of his other photographic works, an invisible disease, loneliness.
Another central element of the exhibition are dead insects collected by the artist during his residency at the MQ. Their excretions are important nutrients for plants, on the other hand, insects recycle trees affected by diseases, eliminate dead wood. Climate change, pesticides, uncontrolled fires are causing a decline in the insect population.

Savle Shubladze (b. 1997, Tbilisi, Georgia) has a bachelor's degree in ecology from Ilia University of Tbilisi (2020) and has been studying at the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program at the Free University of Tbilisi, School of Visual Arts, Architecture and Design VA(A)DS since 2021. He was a scholarship recipient of Ria Keburia AiR program (Georgia) and was shown at TAF (Tbilisi Art Fair) 2022.
He is strongly concerned with themes of ecology, human-nature relations, injury, illness and healing. The artist likes to take site-specific situations or found objects and their history as a starting point for his artistic works. He works with different media and representation strategies, creates installations, but also uses photography and sculpture.

A cooperation with BMEIA.

Text: Simon Mraz
Production: Maria Stephan
Photo: Feral, photo documentation of the site-specific installation, 2023 © Savle Shubladze