Alevtina Kakhidze. All Good?, 2024. Video, 19’57’’
Description
Alevtina Kakhidze’s video All Good? reflects on the story of her Ukrainian-Georgian family, particularly the figure of her father. Applying a decolonial lens to her personal history, Kakhidze highlights how empires construct and influence people’s futures—their place of residence, educational and employment opportunities, family formation—all shaped by resource centralization, labor migration, forced displacement, or deportations. As the curators of the platform Past / Future / Art note, Kakhidze’s work traces the histories of several generations of her family throughout the 20th and 21st centuries: “from the Holodomor, which forced her relatives to leave Vinnytsia region and settle in Donbas, through the Second World War, Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014—all the way to the shelling of Pokrovsk in January 2024, which affected the artist’s close relatives.” [1]
The video performance takes place in Odesa, where her father once studied at the maritime college—now the National University Odesa Maritime Academy—and her mother worked at the rope factory, now PJSC “Stalkanat,” which during Soviet times granted the right to permanent residency registration. In the performance, the artist engages in a dialogue with her father and gives him a tour of locations significant to their family’s history in Odesa, recounting the stories of Russian assaults on Ukraine and Georgia that occurred after his death. With the help of current students, she assembles a Maritime Academy student uniform for him.
The video was presented in the project From South to North in the Ukrainian National Pavilion at the Malta Biennale and in the exhibition Dad, I’m in Odesa! at the Odesa National Art Museum.
Special thanks: PJSC Stalkanat, National University Odesa Maritime Academy, Odesa National Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art of Odesa, Kateryna Khimei, Diana Khalilova, Iryna Semeniuk, Oleksandr Semeniuk, Kabdugali Sidekov, Nataliia Koval, Ilaria Sobolevska, Kateryna Iholkina, Oksana Dovhopolova, Kateryna Semeniuk, Kseniia Paltsun, Volodymyr Damaskin, Oleksandra Shevtsova, Oleksii Voronko, Anna Rybak, Otar Karalashvili.
- From the curatorial text: https://pastfutureart.org/dad-i-am-in-odesa/.
