The Georgian Alphabet

“Anbantkeba”

“Anbantkeba” is a collection of 38 works by Giorgi Sisauri in which the Georgian alphabet is presented through the forms of the Mkhedruli script.

The artistic language Sisauri has developed moves beyond the alphabet’s function as a system of writing: the letter becomes an image, a symbol, and an autonomous artistic world. His alphabet rests on the centuries-deep cultural memory of Georgian writing, yet its purpose is not to repeat historical forms.

The artist treats each letter as a living form, searching within it for movement, rhythm, space, symmetry, the human figure and spiritual symbols. In this process the letter gradually passes beyond the limits of its literal meaning and is transformed into a visual sign. The graphic nature of Georgian writing meets here the traditions of the medieval Georgian manuscript, of Christian iconography and of the miniature — and yet what emerges is an entirely contemporary and wholly individual artistic language.

“Anbantkeba” can therefore be read as the visible poetry of the alphabet: an attempt to return the sign that has become a word to its original, almost secret condition, when a letter was at once sound, meaning, image and symbol.

For Sisauri the Georgian alphabet is not merely a historical marker of cultural heritage. It is living material, through which past and present, the spiritual and the material, text and image can be brought together.