Shota Iatashvili

In 1990, the Georgian poet Shota Iatashvili published his first poems. At that time, much was at stake in Georgia: in 1989, the country declared itself independent, after which it was swept into a maelstrom of revolution, war and chaos. Against the shaky background of armed peace that sought to establish itself a couple of years later, the young artists and writers returned to their artistic life. Shota Iatashjvili joined a group of socially committed artists who gathered together their literary performances and alternative actions under the name Tbilisi Performance Theatre. The American writers’ movement, the beatniks, – with such writers as Ginsberg and Kerouac – much appealed to their imagination. In those times of upheaval, the young Georgian artists had a keen eye for what was happening in the street and they reshaped the toughness of life as it is into performance act in which the word played an important role. Iatashjvili has continued this line until the present day: typical of his poetry is the attention paid to everydayness and the eclectic style in which he describes this.