Psilocybin Mushrooms

Psychedelic trip is one of the practices of structuring “other” reality, beyond which the “real” world turns into mirage and the border between facts and personal interpretations is blurred.

In 1946, the United States tested nuclear weapons within the framework of Operation Crossroads: a series of explosions took place at Bikini Atoll (the Marshall Islands). These experiments resulted in environmental problems discussed widely in the media. After these events, designer Louis Reard presented a new version of a swimsuit – one divided into two parts like a “Bikini-divided atom”. The documentary footage of explosions is compared to the pictures of gigantic mushrooms or flowers formation, where reality and absurd produce almost surrealistic visions associated with mushrooms of hallucinogenic properties.

The series of conceptual landscapes by Tato Akhalkatsishvili titled Psilocybin Mushrooms represent artistic fantasies built on the crossing points of informational streams, where history, associations and interpretations are constantly interacting. The artist’s favorite landscape theme starts with sophisticated painterly compositions expanding the existential drama through objects in the installation thus constructing a space of complex content.

Psilocybin Mushrooms, like Tato Akhalkatsishvili’s art as a whole, displays a complicated, emotional and enigmatic space where the random system of visual signs reveals such motives as power games or results of monopoly on technologies. At the same time, any theme developed in his projects carries an inner deliberation on the problems of contemporary art, its possibilities or qualities that are yet to be discovered.

Khatuna Khabuliani
Art critic