Common Landscape/Greeting a Stranger

The international group exhibition “Common Landscape/Greeting a Stranger” brings together artists and researchers from Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Taiwan and Ukraine to develop a holistic understanding of the changes in society, art and culture. The exhibition’s narrative focuses on the study of socio-cultural processes in a society divided by the borders of nation-states, living between different geopolitical centres and along geopolitical fault lines. The exhibition seeks a common ground on which we can build solidarity. “Common Landscape/Greeting a Stranger” aims to build bridges across disparate individual experiences and different contexts based on trust and solidarity.
The exhibition’s program includes events aimed at different ages and professional audiences: artists-curatorial tours, workshops, artists’ presentations, performances, discussions, and film screenings. The exhibition also includes a small library consisting of publications brought by the artists.
The exhibition Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger is an artistic response to the events of recent years and their tangible consequences, which highlight the ineffectiveness of previous global conventions, significant geopolitical shifts and fractures, the fragmentation of democratic communities, and the willingness of certain countries to reshape the world order in favor of authoritarian regimes. Over the past four years, we have witnessed a series of critical developments: the migration crisis on the EU’s eastern border, which peaked in late 2021; the violent suppression of protests in Kazakhstan in early 2022; Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; the third Karabakh war in September 2023 and the subsequent reintegration of Karabakh into Azerbaijan; large-scale Chinese military exercises simulating the encirclement and complete blockade of Taiwan, the most recent of which took place in October 2024; and the erosion of political freedoms in Georgia, accompanied by mass protests that have been ongoing since March 2023, reaching a peak in December 2024. Additionally, we have seen the rise of right-wing populist movements and their ascent to power in parts of Europe and the United States.
Globalization brings both challenges—manifesting as various global crises—and opportunities, particularly in fostering a deeper understanding of the modern world’s interconnectedness. The ongoing struggles for freedom and independence in Georgia and Taiwan, and especially the war and the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian people, have compelled many countries to rethink their national and international priorities, more clearly define their paths of development, and reassess the significance of protecting freedom and justice. The exhibition Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger does not seek to resolve the contradictions of our time but rather takes them as a starting point for discussions on solidarity in the present and the pursuit of a just future. Its central idea is to showcase the practices of artists who, through the lens of their personal needs, desires, and concerns, not only depict the social realities of their countries but also actively contribute to change. Their actions are inherently performative — understood here as actions that provoke tangible effects.
“Common Landscape/Greeting a Stranger” focuses on geographically close countries such as Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, and Ukraine and the artistic processes there. The exhibition also uses the perspective of a “stranger” or “outsider” whose role is to ask or provoke questions that people living in a given context cannot ask themselves (or cannot say out loud) due to traumatic historical experiences, social conventions or state policies. The exhibition features the works of artists from Georgia and Taiwan – countries that are located at a distance. This makes it possible to use several different points of view and thus overcome the limitations of individual optics – such as the lack of necessary distance to analyse the current situation when looking from the inside or the lack of understanding of the local situation when looking from the outside – as well as to juxtapose artists from regions that rarely appear in the same exhibition.
The exhibition’s title uses the term landscape as a metaphor for horizontal connections and interconnectedness. It is understood as a composition of elements that encompass the past, present, and future. By examining the landscape, we can gain insight into why events unfold as they do. The exhibition’s structure highlights a broad spectrum of performative actions—movement/space, body/voice, word/text, material usage, and audience interaction—analyzing each individually. This approach demonstrates the diverse tools that can be employed to create tangible change within specific sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts. The artists’ works in the exhibition are united by the topics that are important to them in five symbolic landscapes. As these landscapes intersect and merge, they open up space for encounter, understanding, and collective action. The exhibition project is shaped by the landscapes of empathy, action, collaboration, timelessness, and memory. Six texts written by contemporary art critics and publicists from Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Taiwan, and Ukraine represent the countries’ contexts.
The exhibition aims to: showcase the practices of socially engaged contemporary artists from six countries; reflect on the historical periods and processes that have led to our current reality; provide a platform for fostering sociocultural connections across different nations; bring together artists who actively challenge the status quo on complex sociopolitical issues and envision proactive strategies to address them; develop a form of representation for ongoing processes and emerging knowledge.
In the search for the “good scenario” that society needs, the curatorial team does not seek to oversimplify complexity or disregard reality. We do not yet fully grasp what art represents in the current moment, but fortunately, we can engage in dialogue to explore and discover it together.

Yuriy Kruchak, Yulia Kostereva, NienTing Chen