Deda Ena

Meggy Rustamova Adeishvili, who uses her Georgian name on the occasion of this installation, explores the relationship between individual and universal histories and memories. Combining text and image, her poetic film essays translate contemporary themes centred around linguistics, migration, identity and displacement.

The title of the film installation, Deda Ena, “mother tongue” in Georgian, refers to a children’s language book that was written by Iakob Gogebashvili in 1876. Guided by Rustamova Adeishvili’s copy of the book and the Georgian language that the artist had forgotten but relearned, she encounters people with diverse relationships to language and a sense of belonging.

Deda Ena begins with a personal and intimate memory of displacement. Set in the early 1950s, the memory ties into the Soviet Union’s history of forced deportation and resettlement of ethnic minorities, such as the Assyrian community that settled in Georgia in the aftermath of the First World War. Labelled anti-Soviet under Joseph Stalin’s rule, hundreds of Assyrian families, including Rustamova Adeishvili’s mother, were deported in goods trains to Kazakhstan where they remained in exile for many years.