By Miruna Tiberiu
Raised in the North Caucasus and living in Tbilisi, Salomeya Bauer is an artist and documentary filmmaker. Her works, which draw heavily on myths from Georgia and the Caucasus, merge an exploration of bodies that are constantly in flux, escaping binary identification, with an interest in the quotidian. Salomeya’s art is political to its core, grappling with Georgia’s histories at once with the nation’s current political climate. Miruna Tiberiu sits down with Salomeya to discuss the importance of art as activism and her hopes for Georgia’s future.
Salomeya’s 2017 documentary Liza under the influence can be described as a post-Soviet Odyssey. The titular Liza is a young actress and soon-to-be-mother. She has recently uprooted her life in St Petersburg, armed with dreams of making it big on Moscow’s finest stages. The film ambles on, the waves of the Aegean replaced by the murky currents of History. Liza floats through the chaos of Change, her dreams of the future intermingling with the footsteps of an entire generation in Russia who must grapple with their collective past whilst surviving the precarity of the present.
If there is one theme across Salomeya’s work, it is that of Change. Salomeya finds personal roots in her documentary. She, too, is a mother and artist. Her life, too, is an Odyssey of sorts. As part of the first post-Soviet generation, born merely a year before the collapse of the USSR, Salomeya recalls her life through the Historical Events that have changed its course.
Good Shepherd #1. Self-portrait in solidarity with political prisoners and against air traffic with Russia. 18th of May 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
‘When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was the first time the political weather changed my life. Hunger came to Georgia’, she tells me. ‘We didn’t have electricity, water, food. It was very dangerous to stay there, and my mother decided to move me to my grandmother in the North Caucasus. It’s just 300km from Tbilisi to Nal’chik. She thought it would only be for a few months, but I stayed there until I was 18. All my childhood was about waiting for big changes; it starts from the civil war in Georgia, it transformed my own family. Then the wars in Chechnya which influenced the whole region. I decided to study documentary filmmaking because I couldn’t understand the processes of change.’
And so, like Liza, she moves to Moscow to do just that. Salomeya remembers the atmosphere of hope that came with her big move to Russia’s cultural centre. ‘In Russia, during this short time from the 90s until the 2000s, it was the period of pop culture, of speaking out, of discovering a lot of things’. Following the collapse of the USSR at the start of the 90s, all heads turned fiercely to the future, to the possibility of a free life that had never been experienced by any generation in the region by that time. History divided in two; the past was deemed bad, the future good.
Aided by retrospection, Salomeya rethinks this future-oriented stance that defined her generation. To her, the seeds of the present’s time of crisis, Putin’s megalomania and the ‘pick a side, Europe or Russia’ atmosphere in the former Eastern Bloc, were sowed during this very time of hope.
She explains this through a childhood memory: ‘In Russia, they celebrate the victory of World War II, and they call this the “Great Father’s War”. When I went to high school in the early 2000s, they started giving to kids on the 9th of May an orange-black striped ribbon as a symbol of the St George medal, the highest military honour since imperial times. So you grew up as a representer of a military country. I had a really close friend, we grew up together, and, in 2017, that last time I was in Nal’chik, we had a chat about the political situation. We discussed Putin and his influence on our region and generation. He said, ‘Ok, but I’m living my best life, much better than my parents.’ And I thought, ‘You are full of loans, you can’t buy an apartment, you can’t set up a business on your own or anything; neither has the North Caucasus been safe since the 90s. You’ve never seen anything to compare with your life apart from what’s on TV’.
Theseus. Acrylic on canvas. 2018. Courtesy of the artist.
Disillusioned with the failed promise of freedom and democracy and prompted by Russia’s invasion of Crimea as proof of the terrifying direction in which politics was going, Salomeya moved back to Georgia in 2014 after graduating, settling in Tbilisi.
Salomeya often grapples with contemporary histories through the voice of mythology. She tells me about the imprint that the Nart Sagas, which she grew up hearing and reading, has had on her way of processing her life and the world around her: ‘When you read myths, you find a lot of things about routine, daily life, and it is not about judgement. It also speaks to the idea that if you need something, you have to fight for it.’
Two mythological figures feature in Salomeya’s artistic universe: Medusa and the Minotaur. In her painting ‘Theseus’, the Minotaur appears as calm, its beastly appearance incongruous with the kindness that emanates from its eyes. It is clasped in a warm embrace with Theseus. ‘The Minotaur is the story of a creature who was born and never saw life, he spent all of his life inside the labyrinth’, Salomeya tells me. ‘The way I’ve explained it to myself, when Theseus came to him, the Minotaur probably asked him to kill him because he couldn’t continue his life as a monster in a prison’.
Bluebeard series 1. Courtesy of the artist.
A prison of a new form materialises in Salomeya’s ‘Bleeding Beast’. Here, the Minotaur garners the body of a woman, her muscled arms holding up the walls of the world on her very own as she menstruates. Salomeya points out a ‘hidden joke’ in the painting: the vase of tulips peeking from the ground. Tulips are a symbol of womanhood in the region. In certain post-Soviet countries, tulips have been offered to women on the much-anticipated International Women’s Day, becoming, then, a double-edged emblem for the performativity of society’s celebration of women embodied by a mere flower which will soon shrivel up. ‘When I showed this picture to my mum, she started crying. She said: ‘You describe my entire life.’
‘I am telling my story through my experience, my body. Paintings are a diary to my life’, Salomeya recounts as I ask her why she is so drawn to ever-morphing, half-human-half-creature, mythical bodies. I am enraptured by this coming-together of myth and everydayness in her works. In ‘Pure Morning’, whose title draws on the song by Placebo, existential dread becomes entangled in the morning sunlight, the creases of the bedsheets. The painting’s two figures stand both as tiny specks in the Universe and as the totality of it.
Back in Liza under the influence, our protagonist is described as a Madonna, ethereal, just out of one’s reach. We simultaneously follow Liza as she goes clothes shopping and putters around her Moscow apartment. ‘I need to accept my body, and this is my way to accept it through these transformations’, Salomeya tells me. Drawing on her painting ‘Breastfeeding’, she explains, ‘After breastfeeding, my body changed, I couldn’t wear clothes I used to wear before. In one of my exhibitions, a medicine student came to me and said, ‘Thank you for this painting, it is a huge problem that is unspoken’.
Still from Liza under the influence (2017) by Salomeya Bauer.
I cannot help but feel the queerness of this re-structuring of the ways in which we see and interact with bodies in art. Salomeya speaks of how, when she shaved her head as a liberation from the superficiality of appearance, people would sit far away from her on the metro, afraid of a body that escapes clear identification. She tells me that her painted subjects are often inspired by her own body and psychological dilemmas, as well as those of her friends, becoming a mosaic of her queer family in Tbilisi.
To paint queer topics in today’s Georgia is, however, an inherently political act. Whilst being criticised by Georgia’s ‘pro-Western’ president Salome Zourabichvili, the nation’s parliament, headed by a majority from the conservative Georgian Dream party, successfully passed the ‘family values’ bill just earlier this year, after the bill has failed to pass in 2023. The law, which may remind us of Russia’s and Hungary’s similar crackdown of LGBT+ life and culture, essentially labels the community a propaganda machine from which Georgia’s children must be protected.
Last year’s LGBT+ Pride festival in Tbilisi was shut down after a mass of anti-LGBT+ protesters stormed it. This year, merely a day after the bill was announced as successful, Georgian model Kesaria Abramidze, one of the country’s first openly trans public figures, was found stabbed to death in her Tbilisi apartment. When I ask Salomeya what it is like being an artist in Georgia today, she responds, ‘I can’t remember the last time I just had fun with friends and talked about simple things. All our discussions now are around the political situation’.
Salomeya and I meet merely weeks before the 26 Oct parliamentary elections in Georgia, described by the Guardian as ‘the last chance to secure a path to the EU’. The term ‘polarization’ has become commonplace in discussions of Georgia’s current political climate. The president has found her power greatly reduced in the face of Georgian Dream’s agency in parliament. The aforementioned catchphrase ‘between the EU and Russia’, used previously in reference to several other countries in the former Eastern Bloc, hangs ominously over Georgia this month.
Salomeya Bauer. Single counter-picket on GD’s followers peaceful protest. 30th of April 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Aside from the ‘traditional families’ bill, the Georgian government has come under international fire for its passing of an equally-concerning ‘foreign influence’ bill which forces Georgian civil society groups to register as foreign agents if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. This bill has also been described as ‘the Russian law’. At the same time, Georgia’s candidate status for EU membership was accepted in 2023, assigning a further degree of urgency to the upcoming parliamentary elections as Salomeya and I speak.
But Salomeya is adamant to keep fighting through her art as well as on the streets. ‘Art is always involved in protest in Georgia’, she reminds us. Turning to another mythological framework through which to make sense of the world, she explains, ‘Now I’m working on a fairy tale about Blue Beard. In Georgia, we have a joke that everyone dreams of the rich uncle who can just give you money. And today it’s [Bidzina] Ivanishvili who created the oligarch system in Georgia, he became the rich uncle to our society, and destroyed society, our hope’. A politician and oligarch, Ivanishvili, who founded Georgian Dream in 2012 and served as prime minister of Georgia between 2012 and 2013, has become the figurehead for the pro-Putin stance that dominates parliament today. Salomeya explains further, ‘In the story, Blue Beard asks a girl to marry him, and says, ‘But I have a secret, and if you accept to marry me you cannot touch the secret’. And she says yes. It’s the same for us, the majority voted for them [Georgian Dream], and now we have to fight for our lives’.
Past generations remember the iron fist of the USSR on Georgia and annexation of Abkhazia. The current generation remembers that of Putin’s Russia in 2008’s Russo-Georgian War, which resulted in Russian annexation of the South Ossetia region. Salomeya tells me about how generations of Georgians have been coming together on the streets and in artistic communities to fight for their freedom together in the last years. ‘Since the pandemic, the city has started talking to us through the walls. Graffiti is our new medium. One of my favourite things is a new graffiti on the ‘gay street’, and it says ‘Tbilisi is my toxic lover’. We also have one more that says ‘sick da tired’ – and ‘da’ means ‘and’, so ‘sick and tired’. Youngsters feel like that, and you can see it on the streets’.
Mother of Georgia. Courtesy of the artist.
The LGBT+ community in Tbilisi have become intertwined with this force of protest through art. ‘When we talk about activism and art in Tbilisi, we have to mention its drag culture. It’s a very strong community, and our parties and balls allow room for sharing political statements, social problems’, Salomeya explains. ‘A few years ago, we had a Pride Festival, but now people are coming up with their own events and initiatives. Mariam Kanchaveli is a drag queen, one of the strongest activists in Georgia and she is doing her activism on stage with a sense of humour, camp. Together with Mariam and another artist, Tuta Chkheidze, we created a collective. We call ourselves ‘The Room of One’s Own’, after Virginia Woolf’s essay. The idea is to build a space where we can speak about unspoken issues, from illness to mental health to relationships and politics’.
A few weeks after our interview, the 26 October elections happen. Georgian Dream secures a staggering majority. President Salome Zourabichvili, along with opposition parties, call on citizens to protest, accusing Georgian Dream of foul play. Salomeya and I call again in the aftermath. I had ended our last chat by asking her what her vision for Georgia’s future is, to which she answered, ‘I decide to be hopeful. It will be tough, for sure, but after so many years of protest, we have a generation who doesn’t want to move abroad, and they will fight for this opportunity to stay in their own land. I hope we will get the chance to build our future in our own country’. I ask her now if her answer has changed. Speaking from the activist community in this aftermath, she answers: ‘If we fail to defend our young democracy, the country will grow old in a matter of months, because those who choose dialogue over violence and the development of social institutions over endless trade will be forced to think first of all about their security. I don’t want to admit that we’re losing our hope. But now we need as much international support as possible. And we need it more than ever’.
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