Projects
"CLEAN CLEAR WHITE"
Having flown in from Tbilisi, Anushka Chkheidze found herself completely alone inside the empty and as yet unoccupied University of Basel’s Biozentrum: just her, a piano, and the surrounding spaces. Over a two-week period the young Georgian musician and composer was able to explore the building, designed by Ilg Santer architects, with the piano, microphones, a mixing deck, a computer, and her voice. She also assembled a small choir from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis music academy in Basel, who performed in an auditorium in the basement.
Anushka used her field recordings and compositional ideas from her on-site sessions to create the music for this album in the studio in Tbilisi, Georgia. The eight tracks are an acoustic and associative journey through the Biozentrum with a nonvisual form of perception: she encountered eight very different places in the building, and the spatial acoustics and nonvisible interior spaces all play their part.
‘Clean Clear White’ was mixed by Taylor Deupree (Pound Ridge, New York), mastered by Christoph Stickel (Vienna), cut by Sidney Claire Meyer at Emil Berliner Studios (Berlin), and pressed on 180 gram black vinyl by Optimal Media (Röbel/Müritz) with love and care to audiophile standards.
Photos: Walter Mair
"Monheim Triennale" - Ongoing
At The Prequel 2024, the Signature Artists of the Monheim Triennale II will meet for the first time. They get to know each other as well as the city of Monheim am Rhein and its people. They gather impressions and get inspired for their signature projects – and of course they introduce themselves with joint and solo concerts.
As being a singer in folk and church choirs, she was always influeced to work with different types of choirs to create a new pieces for choirs and electronics. Anushka is working on a new collaboration with Monheim Bunter-Chor.
Prequel 4 to 6 July
Photo: Niclas Weber
"324 Mountain Between Us"
Europalia acted as a matchmaker between artists Anushka Chkheidze and Femke Gyselinck – one a musician-composer from Georgia, the other a dancer-choreographer from Belgium – and initiated this meeting.
As many as 324 mountains stand between Belgium and Georgia, or between Anushka and Femke. And yet, despite this seemingly unbridgeable gap, a connection sometimes can arise. Distance doesn’t stand in the way of intimacy. It is a paradox to play with.
The two women made a pact. They probe, measure, count. They trace a mysterious course in the space available, an imaginary journey in 324 stages. In it, Femke again seeks a close connection between expressive, unspectacular movements and live music, combined with a bold but modest performativity. Anushka’s sound evolves through styles beyond ambient and IDM. The chords in her compositions refer to Georgian polyphony, which she looks at from her perspective and knowledge.
In 324 mountains between us, the artists show how Femke’s danced vocabulary and Anushka’s electronic compositions can sometimes bridge the distance between them but sometimes also increase that same distance.
For the scenography and costumes, Femke pursued the collaborations entered into in previous productions: Aslı Çiçek has designed a glowing set for the show and created a variation on the black box that provides inspiring constraints. Nel Maertens and Veronika Vimpelova designed the costumes.
credits
CHOREOGRAPHY & DANCE: Femke Gyselinck
MUSIC: Anushka Chkheidze
SCENOGRAPHY: Aslı Çiçek
SCENOGRAPHY PROJECT ASSISTANCE: Olivia de Bree
COSTUMES: Nel Maertens, Veronika Vimpelova
DANCE DRAMATURGY: Steven Michel
LIGHTS: Elke Verachtert
SOUND: Milan Van Doren
INTERNSHIP: Lucas Resende
ASSIGNMENT AND COPRODUCTION: europalia georgia
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: GRIP: Rudi Meulemans, Lize Meynaerts, Klaartje Oerlemans, Jennifer Piasecki, Sylvie Svanberg, Ruud Van Moorleghem, Nele Verreyken
INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION A Propic – Line Rousseau, Marion Gauvent, Lara van Lookeren
COPRODUCTION: Perpodium
RESIDENCIES: workspacebrussels, KWP Kunstenwerkplaats, kunstencentrum nona, corso, GC De Kriekelaar, théâtre varia, P.A.R.T.S, VIERNULVIER
Photos: Robbrecht Desmet
"Lost Lullaby"
Installation, Composition for several loudspeakers
Outdoor grounds of the former daycare center Krummstraße.
During her first visit to Monheim am Rhein, Georgian artist Anushka Chkheidze discovered the empty daycare center on Krummstraße. The abandoned building and the empty garden inspired her to create her site-specific work in Monheim am Rhein. The idea for the sound installation “Lost Lullaby” was born.
“Childhood is the most fantastic part of life, which is incomparable. Even if you have sad, unpleasant memories, this is the time that makes you complete and that to a large extent defines you as a person.” The basic ideas of “Lost Lullaby” were that children have an “independent, sincere and pure soul,” and that the lullaby is a link between the waking state and sleep. The artist saw the abandoned daycare center as a “link to childhood, something that is lost and never comes back.”
When it comes to lullabies, she says, it doesn’t matter how good the mother’s voice was or how beautiful the childhood memories are, “it’s still the most beautiful song in my life that will never come back.”
During her visits to Monheim am Rhein, Anushka Chkheidze asked Monheim citizens about their favorite childhood lullabies and asked them to sing or hum them for a recording.
The multi-channel work “Lost Lullaby” was a loop of about ten minutes that combined these individual memories into a multi-voiced hymn to childhood.
This could be heard on the outdoor grounds of the former Krummstraße daycare center of the Catholic parish of St. Gereon and Dionysius.
Photo: Niclas Weber
Glacier Music II grew out of a journey – a shared trip into the icy Greater Caucasus mountains of Georgia, as artists from Armenia, Georgia, and Germany collected visceral sensations of nature to channel into potent musical collaborations. Those mountains form a thread across neighboring but diverse musical traditions, and so from this fragile environment, an international collaboration between multi-talented producers and performers sound a poignant, personal note of urgency.
Berlin’s established talents Robert Lippok (in sound – the Raster-media artist) and Lillevan (in visuals) join rising stars of the Caucasus – Anushka Chkheidze lends her harmonic imagination and detailed, intimate piano work; her prepared piano gestures (on ‘Microseismic’) match the sculptural explorations of Robert’s experimental electronics. Eto Gelashvili’s voice carries through like a brisk mountain air; Hayk Karoyi combines a deep knowledge of traditional Armenian folk instruments with innovative compositional efforts. The group’s affection for one another glows out of the music across the release, as evidenced in the easily-flowing live inclusion.
But that mission to speak of an immediate climate crisis is embedded deeply in the work – from the soft deep bass of Matthias Meyer and team’s geophone recordings of shifting ice in ‘Microseismic’, to the imperative sound of time and tragedy pressing forward in the closing Numbers Drop.
Ancient Caucasian tradition meets contemporary sound geographies, where electronics meld with more organic sound influences. The resulting music is at once arresting and intimate, bringing the listener closer to the nature that surrounds us.
"UNLOVE"
“UNLOVE” is the second play of Davit Khorbaladze’s “UN-” trilogy.The trilogy revolves around a crisis, whereas this performance explores the boundaries between the existence and absence of love.
Four bodies and voices, separated from each other, are looking for ways to reunite, while they disappear and break into copies of images, sounds, fragments of memory and typical love drama tropes. Love appears interchangeably in the forms of relief, weapon of repression and political manipulation.
How do we understand love in an unequal condition? Who is given the right to love or be in love and who is not, when love is seen as a commodity?
Based on documentary materials, UNLOVE creates a world that oscillates between nonfiction and fiction, like love itself.
Author/ Director: Davit Khorbaladze
Set Designer: Ana Gurgenidze
Costumes Designer: Levau Shvelidze
Video/Graphics: Rati Dolidze
Composer / Musical Adaptation: Anushka Chkheidze, Davit Khorbaladze
Subtitles – Sergey Fadeev
Cast: Tamara Chumashvili, Gvantsa Enukidze, Giorgi Giorganashvili, Sandro Samkharadze
Photos: David Meskhi
"Epiphany"
Artist is a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of ever living life. (James Joyce)
Relationships between the beings who inhabit the stage are the starting-point of endless explorations inside bodies and minds. As they zoom in and out, we embark on a journey from microscopic impressions to macroscopic feelings as huge as… the most grossly misshapen of superlative realities. This world of psyche and emotion, with rules is both strict and organic.
It got me thinking about Epiphanies and how often they show up in our lives. A light turns on, we have that aha moment where a realization hits home in a way it hasn’t before. It’s enlightening and can be life changing.
What we do with the Epiphany — the awakening — is what matters, right? The doing looks different for everyone. Sometimes the doing is not actually “doing” anything. It’s being the Epiphany. Living the realization, one day, one hour, one moment, one second at a time.
Epiphany – Revelation is a 45 minute long dance performance with 5 dancers: Natia Chikvaidze, Natia Bunturi, Levan Gelbakhiani, Alexander Gadelia, Jonathan Russel.
Choreography: Natia Chikvaidze
Music: Anushka Chkheidze (live set)
Light Design: HITORI (Omar Gogichaishvili)
Video: Saba Shengelia
Costumes: Levau Shvelidze
Scenography: Natia Chikvaidze
The project was realised in the frames of the 6th edition of the Contemporary Dance & Experimental Art Festival in Tbilisi.
Photos: Sophiko Sherazadishvili