Elene’s Lines of Flight @KAMUNA

The Performance »Elene’s Lines of Flight« by Natia Chikvaidze, Davit Khorbaladze and Karolina Sobel is part of a collaborative artistic exchange of the two UNESCO Creative Cities of Media Arts, Karlsruhe and Tbilisi. Taking the Georgian painter Elene Akhvlediani (1901–1975) as its starting point, whose multifaceted life and work resist a single fixed narrative, the project moves through questions of queer-feminist visibility, archival absence, and the historical conditions of silencing – dwelling on how stories fade, fracture, or remain unspoken.

The performance is conceived as a lecture that is disrupted by movement. It combines dance, text, and live music elements, moving between two periods of Akhvlediani’s life: her early years in Paris, when her painting practice focused on nudes, and the landscapes that defined her life and identity during the Soviet period in Georgia. It imagines what the silences in her biography might hold, following rumors and archival omissions rather than official narratives. The title »Elene’s Lines of Flight« refers to a concept by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that describes a movement away from fixed structures, toward contradiction, multiplicity, and imagination.

The performance on August 1 as part of KAMUNA is the premiere of »Elene’s Lines of Flight«. The documentation of the performance will become part of the video installation »Soft Signals« by Natia Chikvaidze, Davit Khorbaladze and Karolina Sobel, which will be shown from August 13 through September 13 on the LED wall in the ZKM Foyer as part of the exhibition »Media Art is Here«.