TICKETS

On Saturday, October 17, Mint, Stockholm and E.A Shared Space, Tbilisi present a programme exploring experimental and underground art practices in Georgia during the turbulent years surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union. Against the backdrop of profound social and political upheaval, underground performance art became a space for imagining alternative forms of collective life and socio-political movements amid the transition.

Art historian and curator Vija Skangale, will present her research into performance practices from the 1980s and 1990s. Through archival images and examples of artists’ work, she will  explore how artists navigated the social and political crises of the period: from the collapse of the USSR and the December 1991 coup to the Georgian Civil War (1991–1993).

Photographer Guram Tsibakhashvili will present his photographic archive, showcasing the  artistic life in Georgia during the period. Followed by a screening of artist Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze’s film Graft Versus Host (2026), a speculative documentary essay connecting the filmmaker’s medical history with post-Cold War geopolitical shifts and their impact on contemporary politics. Curator Elene Abashidze will give concluding remarks.

The same day, Mint opens an exhibition of works by Guram Tsibakhashvili, curated by Elene Abashidze.

A collaboration between Mint, Stockholm, and E.A Shared Space, Tbilisi.

With support from Helge Ax:son Johnsons stiftelse, Längmanska kulturfonden and IASPIS

Vija Skangale

Vija Skangale is a writer, curator, and researcher from Georgia currently based between Tbilisi and London. She is a PhD candidate and a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Vija has participated in various art projects, including those at Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Tate Modern Late, and Tate Exchange, among many others. Her practice lies between research and curated exhibitions & performances (including performance re-enactments). Vija’s written work has been published in outlets such as MoMA, S.M.A.K. Museum, Afterall, Biennial Foundation magazine, the Calvert Journal, and the Tbilisi Public Art Fund, among many others. The upcoming publications include a contribution to a book by Routledge and the University of Basel. Her research focuses on the exhibition histories within the context of post-socialist transitions. She examines under-documented performance practices and exhibition histories in Georgia, aiming to broaden our understanding of performance-making during significant cultural and political transformation. In 2025, she founded the Institute for Contemporary Art Research in Georgia.

Guram Tsibakhashvili

Born in 1960 in Tbilisi, Georgia, Guram Tsibakhashvili is a prolific contemporary photographer known for his powerful visual documentation of Georgia’s social, political, and artistic life – especially during the tumultuous decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Starting his professional journey after graduating from Tbilisi State University in 1982, Tsibakhashvili first worked in chemistry, but soon turned his focus to photography. By the late 1980s, he was photographing the streets of Tbilisi and experimenting with fine art and documentary photography.

Tsibakhashvili’s work captures historic turning points in Georgia – protests, conflict, daily life, cultural revival, and artistic expression in difficult times.He has also played a key role in building Georgia’s photographic and cultural infrastructure. Today, Guram Tsibakhashvili is recognized not only as a witness of Georgian history, but also as a teacher, curator, editor, and mentor shaping the next generation of Georgian photographers.

Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze 

Born in Kutaisi, Georgia in 1983, the artist and filmmaker is now based in Berlin. He studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Tbilisi and then took a degree in new media at the Berlin University of the Arts. His works focus on the moving image, the political background of its production and distribution, and its socio-political significance. They have been presented in numerous international contexts including at the Taipei Biennial in 2023, the National Art Center in Tokyo and the SculptureCenter in New York.

Filmography 2016 Its Just a Single Swing of a Shovel; documentary 2018 The invisible hand of my father; documentary 2019 Mission Accomplished: Belanciege 2022 Stone of Hell; documentary 2026 Graft Versus Host; documentary

Elene Abashidze

Elene Abashidze (b.1987, Tbilisi) is a curator and writer living and working in Tbilisi,Georgia. Abashidze’s curatorial practice spans exhibition-making, publishing and writing. In 2019 Abashidze founded E.A. Shared Space – a project space aiming at creating a cross-cultural and cross-generational dialogue between local and international art scenes. Led by the local historical, cultural and socio-political context, the program supports feminist and queer art practices deeply engaging with the local audience. Exhibition driven the programme comprises artist talks, poetry readings, screenings, presentations and publishing practices.

Between 2024 – 2016, Abashidze was a founding co-editor for a non-profit bilingual series of publications Danarti. Focusing on historical and contemporary art, architecture, poetry and critical thought, the magazine existed both online and in print. The project has been generously supported by Kunsthalle Zürich.

Abashidze received MFA in Curating Contemporary art at Goldsmiths College, University of London and BA in Art History and Theory at Tbilisi State University.

Image: Analog photo from 1994 by Guram Tsibakhashvili

James Richards, Radio at Night, 2015. Photo by Johan Österholm.

James Richards, Radio at Night, 2015. Photo by Johan Österholm.

James Richards, Radio at Night, 2015. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Iman Mohammed. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Isak Sundström. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Luzie Meyer with Vera V Almgren. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Luzie Meyer with Vera V Almgren. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Luzie Meyer with Vera V Almgren. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Alice Notley. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Alice Notley. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Marie Silkeberg. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Alex Franz Zehetbauer. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Alex Franz Zehetbauer. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Alex Franz Zehetbauer. Photo by Johan Österholm.

29 March, 14–17
Zätasalen, ABF-huset, Sveavägen 41

Luzie Meyer (Berlin) with Vera V Almgren (Stockholm); Iman Mohammed (Malmö); Alice Notley (Paris); James Richards (Berlin); Marie Silkeberg (Stockholm); Isak Sundström (Stockholm) and Alex Franz Zehetbauer (Vienna)

Mint Poetry Festival transports us to a linguistic borderland, somewhere between fragility and entertainment. Meanwhile, day turns into night.

American poet Alice Notley makes her first visit to Sweden with a reading spanning a lifetime of writing. Also on stage are poets Marie Silkeberg, Iman Mohammed and author and musician Isak Sundström. The festival includes a newly written performance by artist Luzie Meyer in collaboration with composer Vera V Almgren, video work by artist James Richards, and a repertoire in a piano bar, teetering between the earnest and the absurd, by performance artist and vocalist Alex Franz Zehetbauer.

This year we will also be joined by Nord Books, who will sell an exclusive selection of books by the festival’s poets and artists.

Mint poetry festival is supported by the Swedish Arts Council and the Swedish Academy, and made in collaboration with ABF Stockholm

Graphic design Thomas Bush
Image: Still from James Richards, Radio at Night (2015)

26.1 2025, 14:00 – late (attendees come and go as they please)
Zäta-salen, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

Blank Forms, Mint and Vassa Tassar present a commemorative day-long program honoring the life and practice of Catherine Christer Hennix (1948-2023). Marking nearly a year since Hennix’s passing, this memorial program offers an opportunity for friends and admirers to experience a large-scale realization of her final sound work, Kamigaku, and reflect on her life and work. For this memorial program, members of Hennix’s ensemble—Ellen Arkbro, Mattias Hållsten, Marcus Pal, Susana Santos Silva and Amedeo Maria Schwaller—will present Kamigaku in her absence.

Catherine Christer Hennix was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. Trained in jazz drumming from a young age, Hennix was also an early member of Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion, where she composed computer and electronic music. She studied linguistics and philosophy at Stockholm University before deciding to focus on mathematics, a discipline in which she would continue to work for many decades.

As a sound artist, musician, and composer, Hennix was part of the minimalist New York downtown school of harmonic sound and has worked extensively with some of its key figures, including Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. Influenced by her studies with Pandit Pran Nath, a master of the Kirana tradition of classical Hindustani music, and the contemplative practices transmitted by him, Hennix has produced a large body of sound works, including sine-wave compositions, solo works for tambura and for keyboard, as well as ensemble works performed by her own groups, all of which emphasize an orientation to harmonicity as an expression of the divine.

At Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1976, Hennix both displayed her art—steel sculptures, sine waves, paintings, projections, and texts—in a solo exhibition titled Topos and Adjoints and performed her compositions as part of Brouwer’s Lattice, a ten-day festival of new music she organized with Swedish curator Ulf Linde. She returned to New York to teach in the mathematics and computer science department at SUNY New Paltz in 1978–79 and remained upstate for much of the next decade before relocating to Sweden and the Netherlands. During this time she continued to display her work in group shows across Europe and the United States. Hennix was given the Centenary Prize Fellow Award by the Clay Mathematics Institute for her collaboration with the Russian-American poet and mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin in 2000. Around 2003, she returned to composing computer music, and a few years later assumed the role of bandleader for the first time in decades, playing with Hilary Jeffery, James Fulkerson, and an early iteration of the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. In 2018, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, opened Catherine Christer Hennix: Traversée du Fantasme, her first institutional solo exhibition, while Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery hosted Thresholds of Perception,  a large survey of her work. Hennix’s releases with Blank Forms include an LP of her 1974 interpretation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Unbegrenzt (2020), the Deontic Miracle’s Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (2019), Selected Early Keyboard Works (2018), and the two-volume collection of her writings Poësy Matters and Other Matters (2018). During Hennix’s last years she resided in Istanbul, where she was pursuing studies in classical Arabic and Turkish maqam.

This program is co-presented by Blank Forms, Mint, and Vassa Tassar. It is supported by the Swedish Arts Council, The City of Stockholm and The Sundén Art Foundation, and realized through a collaboration with ABF Stockholm and Elektronmusikstudion (EMS).

For more reading on Catherine Christer Hennix:

Introduction to Poësy Matters and Other Matters – Lawrence Kumpf

Basically One to Infinity: An Interview with Catherine Christer Hennix – Marcus Boon

Domains of Variation – Spencer Gerhardt