Museeum recently ventured into the mysterious treasure that is the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Located in the heart of Culver City in Los Angeles County, MJT welcomes guests to witness their permanent collection, Tula Tea Room, and glorious rooftop garden. Tula is a truly unique experience in which Nanuka Tchitchoua & Tula (a beautiful Silken Wind Hound, named after the Tea Room) hosts a traditionally Georgian Tea Ceremony for all the guests of the museum free of charge.
A 5th Ecology invites over 25 architects, artists and designers to explore ways in which Reyner Banham’s reading of Los Angeles can inform our inquiry of the city today.
In 1971, the noted British architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote his seminal book on the city—Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. In 1972, Banham returned to Los Angeles with a BBC documentary crew to film a homage to the city with which he was so enthralled. Using Baede-Kar—a fictitious audio tour guide—Banham drove across Los Angeles meeting artists, filmmakers, and diner waitresses, enthusiastically extolling the qualities of the sprawling metropolis. In so doing, Banham, the auto-flanuer, part historian and part provocateur, created a new form of critic and an alternative model for studying the city. ‘A 5th Ecology’ examines the under-exposed history of the sprawling metropolis and how to use it as a lens through which to view the contemporary city.
curated by Scrap Marshall & Berenika Boberska
October 2017
WuHo
Nanuka Tchitchoua is a Los Angeles-based artist who moved to the United States as a consequence of the civil war in her home country, Georgia. Having grown up surrounded by a family of art collectors, Nanuka was exposed to art from a very young age. Since then she’s realised that art would be an integral part of her life. Nanuka believes that people are born as stars and are connected by invisible threads. Her pieces are a rare representation of orderly chaos that portray the visible (and invisible) joys of life.
Contemporary Los Angeles, ultimate poster boy for the distended urban condition, has a secret fetish for fixed big boxes, fantasy castles and gated communities. Fragments of medieval echoes appear through the endless fabric of the Hinterlands. The archetypal sprawling city can often be found worshipping the contained and feeling out the edge. Emerging against a backdrop of flat–lining cultural ubiquity, default density assumptions and environmental neuroses, comes a New Romantic Urbanism of figures and fields, Emerald Cities and flowering asphalt.
Join us at Black Iris, Tuesday Nov. 24 for Last Night’s Dream, an evening of experimental film celebrating the artistic output of The Republic of Georgia’s, Nanuka Tchitchoua. The screening will be followed by an evening of music and celebration, with DJ Rattan (Bio Ritmo) spinning rare Georgian, Turkish and Greek LPs from the 60s and 70s in the Tiny Bar.
(Film Listing)
– Movement Cloisonne
– HER
– Deer
– Well Tempered Lebanon
– In the Presence of the Absence
– Impressions from Rustaveli
8pm door for film screening
Nanuka (Nana) Tchitchoua was born in 1978 in Tbilisi, Georgia. She emigrated to USA with her family in 1992 and continued her art and film education at the California Institute of the Arts with a BFA in Art and MFA in Experimental Animation. She is an artist working in media from painting and collage to sculpture and film, all of which draw profoundly on her deeply Georgian soul. It has been her focus and a mission to bring a contemporary perspective on Georgian traditions that have survived cultural transition and upheaval for centuries. Her work is a fusion of ancient archetypes, ethnographic treasures and various cultural icons. In navigating the tenuous path of her dual cultural identity she asserts the transformative possibilities of finding beauty amid ruins, making something out of nothing – a cross-referencing of images that are fiercely nostalgic for a heroic and romantic dream world.
Since 2002, Tchitchoua has been working as the liaison of the Tula Tea Room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Borzoi Cabinet Theatre. Tchitchoua returns to Georgia regularly where she is an artist/curator of the American Pavilion of the FestiNova (International Contemporary Art Festival)
Nana’s short film “Impressions from Rustaveli’ draws inspiration from Georgian medieval epic poem ‘The Knight in The Panther’s Skin’ by Shota Rustaveli – a Georgian monk who dedicated his epic poem to the female King Tamara.
Georgian Literature in film panel discussion with artist Nana Tchitchoua, Translator Lyn Coffin,Georgian writer Gio (Aka) Morchiladze,Georgian scholar, writer and translator Donald Reyfield in conversation with journalist, William Dunbar.
Here is the proof
Buildings, ones that have lived a while at least, are a vessel for the unexpected, hidden deep within. Given the correct channels, we may find hope, entertainment, a route for our desires, a mirror for our grief.