Andro Semeiko-Antelidze : The Unsaid: with Chun Hua Catherine Dong

In The Unsaid, artist Andro Semeiko-Antelidze depicts blank paper, white expanses creased and wrinkled set against a field of black, across 13 canvases. In many of these paintings, one or two hands grasp the leaf of paper, holding it up to face the viewer. Most of the canvases are small, just slightly larger than an A4-size sheet of plain paper. This is one way to read these works: as straightforward still lifes.

Together with Semeiko-Antelidze's paintings, video documentation of Yellow Umbrella - An Unfinished Conversation, a performance conceived by Chun Hua Catherine Dong, is also on view as part of this exhibition at 15 Beautreillis.

IYKYK.

The blank page is a potent symbol. It points to what is still unrealized; it suggests possibility and renewal. Blankness, emptiness, and silence are subjects that have preoccupied artists important in modernity (as demonstrated in this essay by Sixtine Geay) . And as of 2020, and again in 2022, the blank page became synonymous with protest.

With certain slogans banned, the white sheet of paper became a screen onto which any message of resistance might be projected. When faced with repressive regimes intent on suppressing dissent, people spoke out anyway, albeit without a word. The blankness is a strategic silence; this defiance refuses to be pinned.

But of course, we know that the blankness is not "nothing" -- the protesters, the authorities, and us, seeing these works in the context of an art gallery. Can any act of looking ever be apolitical?

What do you do, when you are told to say nothing?

When is nothing nothing, something, or everything?

How do we know what is meant, even when nothing has been said?

How do you say something when you cannot say anything?

Whether quietly or loudly, these questions are demanded of us by Andro Semeiko-Antelidze's series of Blank Paper Protest paintings.