New Images: About “Horse Thief Sayat-Nova-Street”

16 February 2008

heiner-rustawi, originally uploaded by grijsz.
Photo Session with Lela Meparishvili above the town Rustavi

After living in Rustavi, in Avchala and traveling the remote regions of Georgia for 10 years I moved into a narrow street in Old Tbilisi, named after the famous Tbilisi Poet Sayat-Nova, who got killed in the 1795 looting of Tbilisi by troops of Agha Mohammed Khan.

I started dreaming about the historical grounds in Old Tbilisi and suddenly to my mind returned a lithography about a Caucasian Horse Thief, which I made in 2005 at Aslan Tsitaishvilis work shop at Vasha Pshavela Avenue.

A while back 6-7 years ago I had quite some problems to avoid my own three horses stolen in Kakheti. Rumours were afloat, that if your horse had been stolen, you could still try to buy it back at a certain hidden base near Kvareli, if you failed, you never saw it again, but the thieves brought them for sale via the narrow passes to Dagestan.

Out of these memories, out of my love to adventures, to Georgia and to Old Tbilisi was born the series “Horse-Thief-Sayat-Nova-Street” in March 2007. It’s a fiction and urges me to use a wide array of artistic materials. The series started with Digital collages, where I put horsemen from Tusheti and Khevsureti in photos of the narrow Old Tbilisi streets, was followed by drawings, paintings and collages. The first part of this series is spread in the Internet on

http://www.kaukasus-kaleidoscope.com/horse-thief-sayat-nova-st/

Over the time the fictional Horse Thief became an alter ego, a part of myself and reached the topic in a Photo Session with the photographer Lela Meparishvili in November 2007 on the hills above Rustavi.

My upcoming show at Baia Gallery Tbilisi starting on March 28 is intended to give a survey of my artistic discoveries in 2007 and on that romantic theme “Horse-Thief-Sayat-Nova-Street”.

Hans Heiner Buhr, February 2008