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On a sultry late summer night, in a horseshoe-shaped club cantilevered over the Mtkvari River that cuts Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, in two, the artist and drag performer Andro Dadiani was belting out the last bars of his aria act a cappella.
Wearing a sweeping ball skirt the same shade of blue as the European Union flag, and a mask made of his own hair, Dadiani was headlining what the Drag Ball organization had said may be the last of its club series in Georgia. But for the overflow crowd, studded with the country’s leading artists and designers, the evening signified something more ominous: potentially a last gasp for Georgia’s rich contemporary art and cultural landscape.
Georgia, a former Soviet republic of nearly 3.7 million people, the birthplace of Stalin and fixture of the Silk Road, punches well above its weight in visual art, cinema, literature, fashion and music. Internationally known figures include Demna Gvasalia, the creative director of Balenciaga, the novelist Nino Haratischwili and the filmmaker Salomé Jashi.
But two new laws — cracking down on organizations that receive international funding and what the government calls L.G.B.T. propaganda — and the violent response by security forces to civic protests earlier this year have many artists and others working in cultural organizations reconsidering their livelihoods, or even their futures in the country.
Elene Abashidze has already decided to shutter her gallery and art magazine. PEN Georgia, a free expression group, is prepared to close if the ruling Georgian Dream party stays in power after parliamentary elections on Saturday. And the director of Tbilisi Pride has announced that the organization will likely shut down.
Nestled between Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey and the Black Sea, Georgia has for decades been a contested fulcrum of strategic interest between Russia and the West. Since the Rose Revolution of 2003, in which widespread nonviolent protests led to the resignation of its Soviet-era leader, the country has been a key Western ally in the region. But in recent years, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, the ruling Georgian Dream party has grown increasingly critical of Western policies.
In May, the legislature overruled a presidential veto to approve a law that would require nongovernmental groups and media companies that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from international sources to register as organizations “pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” And in September, lawmakers approved a law on “family values and the protection of minors,” which allows the government in this culturally conservative country to ban Pride events and censor films, books and art that it considers to promote homosexuality. (Georgia is a country where the traditional — exemplified by the conservative social agenda of the Georgian Orthodox Church — has coexisted fitfully with the progressiveness of the cultural scene.)
As the election approaches, artists have not just taken to the streets to protest against the government and the new laws, but have also created new works to showcase their opposition. An exhibition at the Window Project gallery in Tbilisi, “Change — Part 2,” included works from 13 Georgian artists, including Dadiani, the drag artist, and Uta Bekaia, co-founder of the queer artist collective Fungus. A work by Koka Ramishvili, a video loop of the handshake symbolizing the peaceful transfer of power in 2012 from Mikheil Saakashvili to Bidzina Ivanishvili, signals how Georgians’ hopes for change in 2012 have succumbed to frustration at how politicians’ revolutionary promises give way to authoritarian tactics to hold onto power.
Bekaia also helped conceive “Tsisperi,” a monograph of queer Georgian art, named to reclaim a Georgian derogatory term for homosexuality. The book was created as “a blueprint for future queer generations to base their research on,” he said, but “now it has become a political statement.”
It also has been swept up in the culture wars.
“One week before publication, I turned on the TV and saw a government press briefing that said, ‘In one week there will be a book of Georgian queer arts, this is the L.G.B.T. propaganda we want to avoid,’” said Giorgi Kikonishvili, co-author of the monograph. The Tbilisi Photography and Multimedia Museum, where the book’s launch party was to be held, then backed out of hosting the event.
“They say that homosexuality was brought from the West,” Kikonishvili said.
Numerous artists have left the country in recent years because of the political situation, their sexuality or a conflict with the Georgian Orthodox Church, according to Dadiani. His own collaborator, Erekle Abashmadze, fled Georgia in 2023, following death threats.
For Georgia’s artists, these laws are the latest examples of what the government has called a “reorganization” of the cultural sector. When Thea Tsulukiani was appointed Minister of Culture in 2021, she initiated a series of changes that included the dismissal of roughly 100 employees of state-run institutions like the Georgian National Museum, the Tbilisi State Conservatoire and the National Film Center. She also appointed party loyalists with no experience in art to leadership positions at national cultural institutions. (For example, an ex-penitentiary official was named acting director of the National Film Center, the main source of seed funding for Georgian filmmakers.)
In a statement to The New York Times, Tsulukiani, who recently stepped down as culture minister to run in the upcoming elections, characterized the changes as necessary to break the influence that artists and Western organizations had over cultural institutions.
“In 2021, shortly after my nomination, an ambassador from an E.U. country expressed dissatisfaction with my work during a conversation in Georgia,” she said. “‘I understand you’re actively supporting culture in rural areas, but we would like you to fund these individuals,’ taking from his pocket a tiny list. It contained fewer than 10 flashy, expensive projects from well-known Georgian artists who had received guaranteed financial backing for many years.”
“This uncomfortable exchange reinforced my determination, as the minister of an independent Georgia, to resist becoming beholden to a small group of monopolistic artists,” she continued. “I firmly stated that we would not be held hostage to their demands like ‘Either you fund us, or we will use our influence to undermine you.’ As a result, we dismantled the privileges enjoyed by this small but vocal group.”
In response to the changes, Georgian filmmakers, writers, music venues and visual artists united in protest. To support their efforts, a New York-based nonprofit, the East-West Management Institute, organized a nonviolent protest training session last September led by trainers from the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Soon after, the State Security Services of Georgia opened investigations into the artists at the training, according to Natalia Vatsadze, part of the performance art group Bouillon and one of the nearly 30 attendees.
“They say the investigation is ongoing and that the artists were preparing a change in government and a revolution,” Vatsadze said. “They say for this they can take the artists to prison for 15 to 20 years.” U.S.A.I.D. and Canvas did not respond to requests for comment.
Vatsadze interprets the accusations as part of a campaign strategy by Georgian Dream that plays on Georgians’ fears of invasion by Russia. At news conferences, on television and on Facebook, the ruling party frames the election as a referendum on Georgian security, saying the West, Freemasons and a “Global War Party” are attempting to sway the upcoming elections and inspire a revolution to install a government that will cause Russia to invade again (as it did in 2008). The U.S. denies the accusations.
“They are cracking down on art because art has the power to sway people one way or another,” said Saba Brachveli, a criminal justice lawyer and member of the Civil Society Foundation, a pro-democracy nonprofit.
Passage of the laws and Georgian Dream’s accusations of Western interference in the election have prompted significant international response. In July, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced the suspension of $95 million in aid to Georgia, and imposed travel restrictions on officials and civilians that supported the Foreign Agents Law. For its part, the E.U. froze $32.5 million in aid and suspended Georgia’s candidacy to join the organization. And Russia offered to help Georgian Dream retain power, if requested.
President Salome Zourabichvili, who is not a member of the ruling Georgian Dream party but whose run for office was endorsed by it, and who serves in a mainly ceremonial role, said that Georgia’s artists and elections free of Russian influence are deeply linked. “The support of arts, creativity and cultural traditions has represented for me, as the president of Georgia, an almost existential task,” she said in a statement to The Times. “Supporting culture means supporting the consolidation of Georgian national identity and statehood. It also means supporting democracy and freedom, since Georgian artists are at the forefront of the battle for tolerance and freedom of expression.”
For Dadiani and the revelers at that late summer drag ball, the night was charged with a sense of civic responsibility to fight for freedom of expression and a future aligned with Europe. There were campy re-enactments of police officers beating protesters, a giant E.U. flag waving over the cheering crowd, and a chic red devil with black hair and lips shouting in Georgian, “Democracy doesn’t seem to exist anymore, you’d better have thick skin!”
On the catwalk stage above the crowd, the piano Dadiani was playing broke in the middle of his act. Undeterred, he finished the night with nothing more than his rich baritone, amplified by an oversized black rose housing his microphone.
“I cry to this song,” he sang, “for those who are forced to pack their suitcases because of this policy, who have already left the country with one suitcase.”
On Sept. 21, the Drag Ball announced on Instagram that it will cease operations.
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