NINO DZANDZAVA
Film historian, archivist, and artist. She has completed internships at the Anthology Film Archives in New York and the Haghefilm Foundation in Amsterdam. After studying film conservation in Rochester, New York, Dzandzava has based her scholarly research on primary source materials. She publishes academic and research papers internationally. Dzandzava has edited and co-edited several books on the history of Georgian cinema and early photography in Georgia. Her artistic projects are also based on research and mainly derive from combining personal experiences with cultural and political contexts and memory politics.
Blue Notebook
War, migration, and borders are themes that recur in the work of Nino Dzandzava. The artist, a refugee from the Georgian breakaway region Abkhazia, has long collected amateur photographs of people of different nationalities, previously or currently living in Abkhazia. These photographs, shot between the 1950s and 1980s inspired her later works, some of which are accompanied by the voices of the people depicted in the original pictures. In her series »Blue Notebook,« Dzandzava interweaves different periods: Abkhazia before the war in 1992/1993 she experienced as a young girl and today’s refugee crisis. Selected works combine impressions of everyday life before the Russia-backed-up conflict between Abkhazs and Georgians: weddings, waiting or walks by the sea, and house facades decorated with palm trees. It is a statement by the artist, whose thoughts, views and voices are sensitive, poetic search for traces. Through the use of cyanotype – an iconic printing technique known for its intense blue tones – the series creates a nostalgic, almost ghostly atmosphere, alluding to the transience of memory and history. The use of old family photographs and the accompanying narratives recorded by the artist expands the work into a multi-dimensional reflection on loss, belonging, and identity. The combination of image and sound and the re-use of personal and collective memory fragments places the »Blue Notebook« in a contemporary art tradition that address post- colonial and conflict-related trauma. The series evokes an intimate connection between the individual and the collective and emphasises the role of art as a medium of remembrance and reappraisal.