უკან

კონცეპტუალური სერია

Patrick Bienert

ფოტოგრაფი

Patrick Bienert

Georgian Sea

The series portrays the western regions of the Caucasus republic where it borders the Black Sea. The photographs open an abstract dialogue with excerpts from a collection of poems from the Dariani Cycle, first published in 1915. The poems stood out for their boldness and openly described female erotic fantasies published under the pseudonym of Elene Dariani. Elene Dariani is one of the most mysterious figures in Georgian literary history. The poems were listed alongside the work of the Georgian symbolist Paolo Iashvili, since they were not acceptable for a woman in Georgia at the time. After republication in 1959, Elene Bakradze claimed the authorship, but the poems were only attributed to her after her death in 1979. The dialogue reflects the tension between societal constraints and the spirit of female expression, weaving together the era of the symbolist movement with Georgia’s ongoing struggle for gender equality.

Patrick Bienert

Patrick Bienert is a German photographer who works on long-term projects of portrait, landscape and documentary photography. He studied photography at the Staatliche Lehranstalt für Fotografie in Munich. His photographic longterm projects are grounded on cultures and identity in relation to the history and its traces between the land and its inhabitants. He predominantly documents youth culture and transformation on the borders of Eastern Europe. Bienert has published the books Wake up Nights (2017), about young nightlife culture in Ukraine.East End of Europe (2020),about a pro-European generation in Georgia. Happy Springs (2023), about Ukrainian youth along the Dnipro River and by the sea, and Armenia (2024), reflecting fragments of collective memory and resilience. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Double Magazine, The Atlantic, M le Monde and Zeit Magazin.