SHALVAK

You can tell Shalva's photographs from their writing. They are black and white like light and shadow, but the color black prevails in its endless shades. Sometimes irises turn silver and rays pierce or half- hide landscapes and bodies. Nothing is stable and solid. Everything is fragmentary and fluid. Urban landscapes are disassembled like images seen through a kaleidoscope. Buildings are being deconstructed. They are photographs that dilate the locus and record time and movement of a continuous journey. Constantly moving from one city to another and from one street to another, from East to West and vice versa, people perform actively in these images, but they are not seen. Their gazes briefly meet and scatter again in the big kaleidoscope. People exist behind the architectural designs. They built great monuments, left ruins, wrote chapters in history and now continue the journey. The end of each photo section calls for a pause in the movement which corresponds to a stop at the Caravansaraï, the fixed idea that hovers over Shalva's work. These pauses are stations of rest, contemplation, but also communication and evaluation. In the Caravansaraï the nomads exchange their findings and their stories of the routes that intertwine like the branches of a great tree. Until the new route in doom and glory begins, the next chapter in this travel in progress.

Maria Tsantsanoglou
Director of MOMus - Museum of Modern Art, Thessaloniki

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