Wintering Over Is Over

“The fake country was collapsing.

Under Gorbachev, we already knew that it was inevitable.

Just like every other change, it was a painful and necessary change. Except that we were unaware of the pain that still laid ahead, so at first we just rejoiced.

Once, Mamuka Tsetskhladze came to me. He had a way of sugar-coating pills. He offered me to hold an exhibition, to see how many of us were around in fall, and then how many would still be here in March, when winter would be over. And the exhibition was titled conveniently: Wintering Over.”

Guram Tsibakhashvili

Twenty-five years after this exhibition, Guram Tsibakhashvili is traveling through time to describe this momentous period in Georgian history, in which the newly established state is struggling to cope with war, starvation, and the cold, on one hand, while contemporary art is springing up to blossom in the country fresh out of the Soviet Union, on the other.

Wintering Over Is Over is a conventionality filling the author with hope that that trails and tribulations are dead and buried, and the art inspired by the then controversies is now part of history. Still, this exposition gives rise to occasional questions like what have we inherited from the 1990s? What has changed in these 25 years? Has anything changed at all, or is it just wintering over that is over?

The book combines up to 250 photographs by Guram Tsibakhashvili, his stories, and essays by Ana Kordzaia-Samadashvili and was created in collaboration with the publishing house "Indigo".