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Tbilisi Photo Festival kicks off on September 12

By Mariam Chanishvili
Monday, September 2
The opening of Tbilisi Photo Festival will take place on September 12 at Amphitheatre of Stamba Hotel.

The series of events will take place through one week of September 12-21.

In the frame of the 10th-anniversary edition, the festival is presenting present Nan Goldin with the series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

Nan Goldin is an American photographer. Her work often explores LGBT bodies, moments of intimacy, the HIV crisis, and the opioid epidemic. Her most notable work is The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which documents the post-Stonewall gay subculture and Goldin's family and friends.

“We all tell stories which are versions of history- memorized, encapsulated, repeatable, and safe. Real memory, which these pictures trigger, is an invocation of the color, smell, sound, and physical presence, the density and flavor of life. Memory allows an endless flow of connections. Stories can be rewritten, memory can’t. If each picture is a story, then the accumulation of these pictures comes closer to the experience of memory, a story without end,” describes Goldin.

Other events will take place at Bath District / Legvtakhevi, Rooms Garden Hall, Mushtaidi Park, G. Leonidze Literature Museum, Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum, Untitled Gallery Tbilisi Alternative archive exhibition, etc.

Opening of Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum will also be featured within the frames of the festival.

Unus Mundus: from Rituals to Trance will take place on September 16. Unus Mundus is a multi-screen installation exploring the world of sacred music and rituals - composed of more than 100 films shot by Vincent Moon and Priscilla Telmon for their Collection Petites Planètes, made over the past ten years, away from the classical forms of cinema production and distribution, and always published under an open-source license.

The closing of the festival will take place on September 21 at Wine Factory. Sacred + S A Music + Cinema Ritual by Vincent Moon & Pricilla Telmon live music/screening will take place on the last day of the festival.

Tbilisi Photo Festival was co-founded by French photographer, currently Photo Editor in chief at the French daily newspaper Liberation, Lionel Charrier and the Georgian photo curator and journalist Nestan Nijaradze. It was first launched in 2010, in partnership with Les Rencontres d’Arles. Nine editions later it has become not only the most important photo festival in the region but one of the major annual cultural events in the Caucasus.