H3ll

• three channel video installation, 6’53’’, 2017/2023

The three-channel site-specific video installation departs from the moving pictures created by Gvantsa Jishkariani in 2017 to accompany a series of art and music events organise by her and her friends. Held in Georgia in the 2000s, “H3lls” were the first queer-friendly guerrilla performative happenings with art and live music. Sound in “H3ll” was created by Aghnie. The video consists of the artist’s own recordings as well as Internet-sourced found footage of crime, sex, violence, justice and deconstruction of it all. Collage, as an approach allowing Jishkariani to combine seemingly disparate objects to create a new idea, is an important feature of her artistic practice and one that she explores through different digital and material media. The artist likens the melancholy permeating the work to glitter sprinkled over traces of past violence and traumas, a shadow of past sadness of a memory of survived pains. In “H3ll”, she brings together images of destruction and a sense of hopelessness, in which, however, an escape can also be found. As escapist acts of getting lost in the vastness of information, these sites of fragility and deprivation are intertwined with numerous pop- and trash-culture references using the aesthetics of abandonment and opulence, showing their traces on us and on politics of now and in the future. By positioning her own footage recorded in Georgia within videos sourced from West-influenced yet geographically undetermined Internet, Jishkariani also looks at the geo-political aspect of image making.