Cultural Heritage Representation at Holoseum in Tbilisi

Tinatin Baghashvili

When people travel, they usually visit some local national museums to learn more about the destination country. Recently, contemporary approaches to cultural organizations have become crucial to their existence. The digital age and the contemporary world have overcome the traditional understanding of museums. Therefore, the audience has different demands than 20-30 years ago. There are many museums in Georgia, only a few of them are privately owned, most are owned by the state. 

Holoseum Tbilisi

The privately-owned museums are great examples of how the museum sector works, supporting the creative industries and establishing a unique niche in the field. These museums offer the public new ways of being exposed to cultural heritage. These museums are more flexible to the new challenges and like to integrate digital approaches. Most of them focus more on social media than on the website, as the Georgian audience they target are mostly younger generations who are active users of social media.

As the COVID19 pandemic in 2020 has changed our lives, so it has changed the lives of all cultural organizations. The government of Georgia has announced special regulations to reduce the number of COVID19 positive population. They have issued a total lockdown order which includes closure of all public transport, shopping malls, cultural centers such as cinemas, theaters, museums, concert halls, etc.

It is significant that some of the museums in private hands have changed profile and are still in operation. This can really be called a creative and open-minded approach. One of the examples is Holoseum Museum in Tbilisi. It is a newly opened museum in early 2020, which offers visitors a redesigned cultural heritage of Georgia and the world. The space is full of digital screens, more than 100 projectors and moving 3D images. Visitors can enter the museum and move around in an unreal world where the images change and completely immerse in the art. It is a museum without frames and offers a digital show.

One of the first exhibitions was about the well-known Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani. I wrote about this artist in my very first blog when I saw the hanging oblique painting of him. At the Holoseum, one experiences Pirosmani's art in a very different and modern way. It offers visitors not hanging paintings as usual, but huge screens of digital, moving paintings. It is spectacular and worth a visit if you are ever in Tbilisi. 

Reality Show

Because of the pandemic covid19, the Holoseum museum also faced strict closure orders. However, the management came to terms with the reality and came up with a new idea of opening the museum space for open dialogs and interaction. They initiated the program "Reality Show - Guest in the former museum" and started a live stream on the Facebook channel. The topics are diverse and open for interaction. In this way, the museum opened its doors to a wider audience and also reached out to additional audiences who would be interested in specific topics on the show. In addition, a new channel was set up on Youtube where the recordings are uploaded.

To sum up, Holoseum can be one of the contemporary cultural organizations that successfully faces and copes with the pandemic challenges, initiates new ways of cultural heritage representation by integrating digitalization. This museum brings Georgian cultural heritage back to life by presenting it on digital screens or/and making live shows. Moreover, the museum does not operate only as a traditional museum, it is more participatory oriented and creates a platform for dialog.