As it was lived.
Photography in conversation with other media.
Developed within Decagon Gallery, Brooklyn.
New York · Tbilisi
Founder and curator, Monday Between
Curator and artistic director, Decagon Gallery
The question we begin with.
It didn’t begin as an idea.
It began as a conversation on the cold floor of a hallway. I said I wanted to make something one day, and call it Monday. On the other end of the call there was a long silence. Then: “This is something big. I believe in it.” I didn’t, yet.
At the time, I still did not understand that postponement had already become a way of living.
The name came before its meaning.
Monday, August 22, 2022. Waiting for the sunrise on the wrong side, in the west. I was asked what I dreamed of. I answered, but it was hard. Nothing had a name yet.
Four years later, when I started to act, I learned that Monday is the Moon’s day. It comes after the Sun’s and has no light of its own. Sometimes it takes someone or something to be the Sun, to light a room where everything is already there. That morning brought me mine. Monday Between still works with that light.
I want to show you one object.
A lighter, bought on December 22, 2024, at the Spar near Sloterdijk station in Amsterdam. There is nothing remarkable about it. But it holds something I have not let go of.
For a long time, unresolved things took more space in my life than anything I did. I am building this while I still carry all of them. Pretending they were gone took more strength than living with them. The photographs on this site were never meant to be part of a design. This one too. The same is true for the coordinates, dates, times and video fragments. Monday Between is built from them. It is a place where people can tell their stories, even if nothing is resolved yet.
Every project begins in the middle of something.
Monday Between is a curatorial line working with photography and other media. Each project starts with what a person is making while parts of their life are still unfinished. The work may be complete. What its maker is living through may not be. Every conversation begins a little before the work, with the person who carries it. An exhibition can hold both: the work, and what is still going on around it. What enters that space is decided together.
This is where Monday ends. The next day comes anyway.
My name is Teona Machavariani, founder and curator of Monday Between, a place I postponed for years. I once said out loud that it would exist. This is it.
I am between letting go and not knowing.
What are you between?