Flies bite, it’s going to rain, 2018

Basel 2019
Flies bite, it’s going to rain

Daniel Marzona

Installation
Soil, wood, clay, plaster, concrete; 600 x 680 x 1460 cm
The works of Vajiko Chachkhiani are shaped by a poetic humanism given shape by personal experience and political realities. The artist condenses his subjects by using reduced forms in a subtle interplay between revealing and concealing, psychological explorations and material immediacy. Parallel to his sculptures and installations, Chachkhiani has developed a cinematic oeuvre ranging from the documentation of single occurrences to more narrative films that hover between dreams and reality. The installation Flies bite, it’s going to rain consists of a forest of dead trees, which encircles fragments of sculptures borrowed from both antiquity and history. The forest may be seen as a metaphor for an outer narration, while the fragments of historical and mythological sculptures represent the complexity of an inner narration. A physically impenetrable environment, the space reflects on the conditions for developing a psychic life – mythological and recent narratives intertwine, past and present melt together within the framework of historical conditions.