Alevtina Kakhidze. Gardeners’ Competition, 2018. Video, 8’55’’

Description

The work Gardeners’ Competition is part of Alevtina Kakhidze’s long-term project Adult Garden, through which the artist presents artworks as well as research and civic initiatives that explore the autonomy and sustainability of gardening practices. This work is also part of the external project Boarder, which included residencies across Ukrainian cities — specifically between Sloviansk and Uzhhorod. Alevtina Kakhidze served both as curator of the residencies and as the artist who created her own work, Gardeners’ Competition.

While working on the Adult Garden project, the artist identified five roles that gardeners take on, depending on the type of their work and their attitude toward the garden. These roles are the Observer, the Owner, the Servant, the Researcher, and the Gift Receiver. Accordingly, Kakhidze designed a headpiece that can be reassembled to allow for transformation into different gardener roles. In this hat, the artist, together with Khrystia Liulchenko, filmed a video where she interviewed gardeners in Sloviansk and Uzhhorod, searching for a winner with their own unique concept of creating a garden.

The residency project was implemented by the NGO Misto-sad with support from the International Renaissance Foundation.