A collaborative project spanning more than two decades, with many hiccups in between, is finally coming to fruition. “Discovering Georgian Cinema,” a series jointly produced by the Pacific Film Archive and the Museum of Modern Art, is the first comprehensive retrospective of the overlooked national cinema of Georgia. The series, which takes place at MoMA, will feature nearly 50 films and will be split into two sections: the first, titled “A Family Affair,” will be presented from September 23 through October 16 and will focus on the many bloodlines that run through Georgian Cinema history, from the earliest silent period through the present day. (The second, titled “Beyond Blue Mountain,” will begin on November 22 and will focus more closely on three distinctive periods in Georgian cinema.)

In a recent phone conversation, ARTINFO spoke with Jytte Jensen, curator at MoMA’s department of film, about the origins of the series, the difficulties of putting together such an expansive program, and where Georgian cinema is today.

This series has been in the works for a number of years. When did the process of putting it together begin and when did you become involved?

I actually got involved very early on. I went with my then-boss Adrienne Mancia, who was the curator here at MoMA, to Tbilisi in 1991. That followed my first time at the Moscow Film Festival in 1988, where all the talk was about Tbilisi — that is where everything was happening. Adrienne and Edith Kramer at the Pacific Film Archive had been talking about Georgian films for a while, and whenever [Georgian] filmmakers would come they would often visit the PFA and MoMA. Often they would deposit their films at the PFA because they didn’t want to take them back home because they didn’t know what would happen to them. So the PFA has, over the years, assembled a really wonderful collection of Georgian films, starting all the way back with [former PFA curator] Tom Luddy, who’s now at the Telluride Film Festival, and Edith Kramer and now Susan Oxtoby. MoMA showed many films from the Russian Republics in the 1990s, with a special eye to one of the liveliest, which always was the Georgian cinema, and had filmmakers here and bought a few prints, which are in our archives. We always wanted to do a very large exhibition, and the two curators that came before Susan and I tried many times. But it never happened. Mostly because we dealt directly with the Georgians and they were very reluctant to give us prints from Gosfilmofond, the Russian film archive. That was where the major films were deposited during the Soviet period. There were no prints in the archives in Tiblisi. So Susan spent over a year and a half going to all the major European archives to find prints there we could use, which is what really made this series happen now.

You mentioned the difficulties of working with archives. Were there other difficulties in putting together the series?

The filmmakers have always been eager to participate. They want their films to be shown and they’re eager to show their films in the US. There were major exhibitions of Georgian cinema in Germany and France in the 1990s, but we could never get it together here simply because we could not get the right prints and we wanted to do it very comprehensively. We even planned larger exhibitions than this one, 60 to 70 films. This one is just below 50 at MoMA.

What has been the biggest surprise during this long process?

One of the surprises has been how well it holds up. I did see a lot of these films in the 1990s, and the historic films are pretty much what we selected then. But one of the great things about doing it now is that there’s an ongoing discovery about Georgian cinema because it has been so hidden and, in some cases, censored. Not everything that’s very, very good, and should be a major part of film history, has been discovered until recently. For that, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival has made some major discoveries by Russian and Georgian cinema experts. They found films in the archives that we didn’t know existed, including a very important film called “Buba,” from 1930, by an early female director, Noutsa Gogoberidze, who was the mother of the most famous Georgian feminist filmmaker of the 1960s and 1970s, Lana Gogoberidze. Noutsa was in a Stalinist camp and her films were always suppressed. Now Lana has found one of her mother’s films, which is amazingly beautiful and really a main discovery in terms of subjective documentary cinema. It’s been discovered in the last four years and we’re hoping to add it to our collection at MoMA.

Was there work that you could not include in the series, due to lost or damaged prints?

Yes, both of those reasons. There’s a lot of work to be done and they’re very aware of this in the various archives and film centers in Tbilisi. There’s s a lot of work to be done on prints, subtitling, and just really access to films so people can preview this treasure trove of films. So, yes: There’s films we heard about but couldn’t find; there’s films that we knew we wanted to include but were not able to find good prints. This is the minority, though. We did find a lot of stuff we wanted to include, and it’s been great to have this collaboration with so many archives. It also opened up to the Georgians that this is how they can collect their film history. Now they know where we got all these prints from and there are really not a lot of excuses other than money, and that is a very valid excuse of course.

I wanted to ask about the structure of the series, which is broken up in two parts.

I’ll tell you, really, I broke up the series for practical reasons. We start on September 23 and go to October 16. Right after that, we open our annual To Save and Project Festival. That goes for a month, and when that series ends we’re doing a joint event, which will open the second part of the Georgian retrospective with Kote Mikaberidze’s “My Grandmother,” from 1929. We wanted to make a break there because it’s very much the same audience the two programs are courting, people who are sensitive to film history and want to make discoveries and see films that don’t open in a movie house. We didn’t want to overlap, and we think both series are valuable. It also was natural because we wanted a populist first section, with this idea of the many family strains that go through Georgian cinema from the very beginning until now, where many of the new filmmakers are third generation filmmakers. We programmed also so we had a chance to show the three areas where Georgian filmmaking is brilliant: the silent period, the period of Soviet filmmaking in the ’60s and ’70s — where Georgian filmmaking was very strong — and the current generation with the New Georgian Cinema. Now, you can’t go to a festival where there’s not a Georgian filmmaker either participating or winning the prizes. Sarajevo just gave its Jury Prize to a Georgian film, “Brides,” by Tinatin Kajrishvili.

Is there a particular film you’re most excited about showing people?

No [laughs]. I’m excited about the films we’re showing with musical accompaniment. We open with Nikoloz Shengelaia’s “Elisso,” and this brilliant American composer, who is an expert on Georgian folk music, has made a beautiful composition. I’m excited about seeing this film come to life with ancient but still contemporary music.

It begins with a somber-seeming wall text and ends with a countrified punk dissolving his grandmother in lye. If you’re looking for highbrow and refined, this is not it: Mike Kelley’s “Reconstructed History,” a 50-part series on view atSkarstedtin Chelsea through October 25, is as rude and ill-mannered as the explosive flatulence that is one of its many subjects. (Also popular: Bestiality; comically enormous penises; various configurations of oral sex involving comically enormous penises; Benjamin Franklin appearing to sign a treaty with his own comically enormous penis; etc.)

The works are all small found images, most of them depicting key moments in American history, centered on sheets of graph paper, and defaced by Kelley with a pen. Those defacements tend toward the sort made by hormonal young men on bathroom walls or subway advertisements: Boobs, dicks, balls, all those basic anatomies sketched with puerile glee. Both the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building gain a pair of hairy testicles; a scene with Lewis and Clark degrades into the scatological. History’s players turn out to be little more than libidinal brutes, groping and poking and smoking weed.

It is, of course, impossible to divorce this body of work from Kelley’s larger oeuvre, not to mention his untimely end. (What happened between these exuberant dick jokes and the artist’s suicide in 2012?) Kelley’s work was so often obsessed with the troubled terrain of childhood, and here he’s the bored high-school student mucking up his textbook in the back row. Somehow, it doesn’t come across as unpatriotic, even — just disdainful of the pomp and circumstance that attaches to the story we tell about ourselves and our investment in this granfalloon we call the United States. (Kudos to Skarstedt for having the guts to open the exhibition on September 11, even if it was an accident of scheduling. The gallery also has plans to republish the series in book form — the original artist’s book, published in 1990, can be purchased for $6,000 — which is good news. But maybe don’t buy it for your grandmother.)  Silly as “Reconstructed History” can seem, it’s strangely affecting, and not just because of the fate of its creator. Our forefathers barf on the Declaration of Independence, the American eagle barks “Bite It,” and the self-seriousness of both the nation and the art world is mercifully punctured, one cartoon phallus at a time.        

Kristen Schiele at Lu Magnus Gallery, through October 12 (55 Hester Street)

“It feels as modular and free as I can make it — lots of details, color, and textures,” says Kristen Schiele of the paintings, collages, and wall sculptures in her latest exhibition, “Spirit Girls.” Schiele — who recently gave birth to a baby girl — has created these works as a thought experiment, projecting the sort of environments her daughter might inhabit and encounter as she becomes a young adult. Overall, it’s a massive development of what the artist terms her “lo-fi punk vernacular,” with layered elements (silkscreen, airbrush, acrylic, oil, stamped pigment) combining to create vibrantly intricate vignettes. Certain paintings consist of several canvases and appear as oddly shaped conglomerates; others are done on Baltic plywood panels with holes and gaps excised into them. The works are loaded with cultural touchstones, from graffiti that Schiele has spotted in Bushwick to the first, John Cassavetes-directed season of “Colombo” and a favorite German graphic novel whose title roughly translates as “Chicken, Porno, & Fisticuffs.” (Schiele describes the resulting, collage-style aesthetic as a type of “quilt.”) Many of the paintings have an embedded reference to the act of drawing or painting itself, as in “Doodle Chalet,” in which Schiele’s daughter sketches a view of a mountain. Motherhood has clearly invigorated the young artist. “I’m so happy right now,” she effused. “Everything’s about making stuff.” Her optimism is refreshing. If this is what the future looks like — shot through with a nervous, neon energy; alive with kinetic patterns — I’ll take it.

Rebecca Warren at Matthew Marks Gallery, through October 25 (523 West 24th Street)

These painted-bronze sculptures elicit a strange mix of emotions, their phallic, distended Giacometti forms plumped with unexpected breasts and ornamented with pompoms. They’re both silly and noble, as are the hulking bronze rocks — lumpy and pattern-adorned — sitting on wheeled dollies. Warren mixes things up with a few more Minimalist pieces, like “You Are Quiet, I Will Be Too,” a steel, paper, and pompom wall sculpture that’s like an indecipherable sentence spelled out as a shelf.

Jason Rhoades at Zwirner Gallery, through October 18 (537 West 20th Street)

It seems like just yesterday that the Zwirner mini-empire invited a certain 20-something market darling to build a factory in one of their galleries, cranking out sugary candies along with a pervasive bad attitude. (But hey, who’s bitter?) The late Rhoades’s “PeaRoeFoam” is another factory of sorts, albeit a gonzo one. Thus speaketh the press release: “PeaRoeFoam was Rhoades’s self-made recipe for a ‘brand new product and revolutionary new material’ created from whole green peas, fish-bait style salmon eggs, and white virgin-beaded foam. When combined with non-toxic glue, they transform into a versatile, fast-drying, and ultimately hard material that Rhoades intended for both utilitarian as well as artistic use.” The re-booted installation, which was first seen in 2002, is bursting at the seams — with PeaRoeFoam pellets, blaring lights, found images, a tiny motorcycle, and a row of industrial shelves whose mellow orange hue make it look like a very disheveled Home Depot has been plopped down in the white cube. Forget a certain someone’s ill-fated candy factory — it’s Rhoades that hits the real sweet spot.

Fred Wilson at Pace Gallery, through October 18 (534 West 25th Street)

This array of conceptual work from 2004 through 2014 is punchy and pared-down, juggling a limited visual iconography (the design elements of African nations’ flags; bulbous blown-glass tear drops that appear to rain down the wall) and an almost entirely black-and-white tonal palette. “The Mete of the Muse,” 2006, pairs an “African” statue with a “European” one, mixing two very different visions of femininity, sexuality, and grace. 

Philippe Weisbecker at Zieher Smith & Horton, through October 4 (516 West 20th Street)

This show of intimate drawings, paintings, and sculptures at the newly rebranded gallery is full of tiny revelations. Scott Zieher, who met the French artist about a decade ago, describes Weisbecher’s complex appeal: He’s “deeply aware of Minimalism,” yet the work also has “the naivete of the opposite end of the emotional and conceptual spectrum in its vernacular, outsider feel.” The drawings — of buildings, or trucks, among other things — exhibit that paradoxical nature, delivered with a sort of mildly drunken, architectural imprecision. (I wouldn’t trust Weisbecher’s structures to stand up in the real world, but on paper, they're a delight.) “About a year and a half ago we visited Philippe’s Paris studio and realized we were prepared to mount the kind of show that could do justice to a survey of 15 years of his hard work,” Zieher explained. “He became like a beacon of purity — a perfect choice for the first show of our new collaborative endeavor.”

ALSO WORTH SEEING: Allora & Calzadilla’s “Fault Lines” at Gladstone Gallery, through October 11, which features hourly performances from adolescent members of the American Boychoir School and Transfiguration Boychoir. They sing and recline on stone sculptures, operatically delivering lines like “You must be the reason for contraception.” (Fun fact: Over at Luhring Augustine’s Roger Hiorns show there’s also a performer who sits on a rock. But he’s naked, and of age. And he doesn’t sing.) 

— Lorenzo’s Reina Sofia Gift: Gallerist Soledad Lorenzo has donated 385 works from her collection to Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, including pieces by 90 artists, primarily Spanish. Lorenzo closed her own gallery in 2012 after 26 years of operation and now wants the works to have greater public access: “One of the meanings of art, for me, is to educate us, so there is no better place than the Reina Sofia Museum,” she said. [ARTnews]

— Mexico’s Baroque Museum Stalled: Just a month after its ground-breaking ceremony, construction on the $105 million building for the International Baroque Museum, designed by Toyo Ito, was denied proper environmental permits. [TAN]

— Getty Foundation Launches Conservation Initiative: Through grants of $50,000 to $200,000, “Keeping It Modern” seeks to preserve 10 international landmarks of modern architecture, including Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House in Australia and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago. [LA Times]

— New Constable Work Discovered: In preparation for the John Constable show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, workers discovered an oil sketch of Hampstead Heath, dated 1821, under the lining of another painting. [Daily Mail]

— Ai Weiwei @ Alcatraz: The artist discusses the political — and personal — significance of his upcoming jailhouse exhibition, “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz.” [NYT]

—  Heimo Zobernig will represent Austria at the Venice Biennale. [ARTnews]

— A drawing faxed from David Hockney to a friend in 1988 will be auctioned in New York. [ArtDaily]

— Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial design remains in limbo as the committee was unable to convene enough members to vote. [Washington Post]

— MacArthur Foundation grant winner Alison Bechdel will use her newfound funds to write another memoir. [NYT]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

After “Matador,” a 2013 exhibition at the Journal Gallery in Brooklyn, Eddie Martinez sort of hated paint. “I had a negative reaction, I got really turned off by it,” said the artist, who found himself avoiding the studio after completing the works in the aforementioned show: Large, quasi-abstract canvases that serially explored the contours of a Picasso-esque bull. To deal with his creative block, Martinez started walking the beach on the North Fork of Long Island during the summer, pondering if three-dimensional work might be the way forward. “I wanted to do sculpture,” he explained, “but I didn’t know how to do it.” The answer turned out to be fairly simple: Gather whatever weird or evocative materials are discovered underfoot, and combine them in ramshackle, brightly colored configurations. “This is a lobster trap,” Martinez said in his Bed-Stuy studio, pointing out various elements in a series of modest sculptures. “That’s a tennis ball. Foam. Milk caps. Rusty things...” A number of these tiny pieces were shown at Half Gallery earlier this year; Martinez also created painted-bronze versions of some, which were nearly impossible to distinguish from the originals.

Upon returning to Brooklyn, Martinez translated the aesthetic of the hand-held sculptures into larger pieces, which — thanks to their human-scale — end up with a more figurative, bodily orientation. Found objects are combined with planks of wood and ample amounts of plaster. For some of these materials, beach-combing proved insufficient. (“I found a marine-material graveyard in Long Island — where buoys go to die,” Martinez said.) And, thankfully, he started painting again — a series of canvases that are more abstract than ever, gestural and sketchy despite their large-scale, with a surprising amount of breathing room. While the paintings still hew to the cadre of influences that Martinez is often mentioned alongside — Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston — they have more or less abandoned the figurative elements of epic earlier work, like “The Feast,” a dense triptych from 2010. Baby wipes and other detritus are affixed directly to the surface, along with dirtied-up computer printouts of Martinez’s own earlier paintings, which are stuck into the canvas with push-pins.

These new works, along with sculptures and drawings, are on view through October 25 in “Nomader,” Martinez’s first solo show with Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery. The exhibition title, he said, refers to his own peripatetic childhood, shuffling between both coasts after his parents’ marriage dissolved. Paintings like “Perfect Stranger,” 2014, collide blobby slabs of primary colors against a marine-blue background. In many ways, they resemble two-dimensional versions of the sculptures. Beginning with the “Matador” canvases, Martinez said he sought “a solid push toward abstraction: Pare it down as much as possible, and have it just be about shapes, color, and composition.” Despite his six-month painting hiatus in 2013, these new works show that he’s fully re-engaged with the medium: Loose, energetic, and decidedly unstuck. 

— Robert Irwin Plans Major Marfa Work: The Chinati Foundation has commissioned Robert Irwin to create a large-scale installation in Marfa, Texas. Set to be completed by 2016, the work will occupy a former army barracks hospital on the foundation’s 340 acres. “The windows will gradate, one side will start all white and become gray,” Irwin said. “The other side will do the opposite. The lights are the show.” [LAT]

— Zaha Debuts Housewares: Having garnered most architectural accolades, as well as forayed into the worlds of jewelry, footwear, swimwear, and even perfume, Zaha Hadid is now venturing to department store Harrods with her debut collection of housewares. Though the artist began her career with certain interior pieces back in the 1980s, she’s now bringing her trademark flowing lines to candles (£252), serving platters (£9,999), and more. [The Guardian]

— Twombly Foundation to Sell Works: Today in Carol Vogel’s column we learn that the Twombly Foundation is planning to sell 11 works at Christie’s this November. None of them, however, are Twomblys. The works by Lichtenstein, Warhol, Bruce Nauman and Claes Oldenburg come from the late artist’s personal collection. In other “Inside Art” news, former Matthew Marks staffer Adrian Rosenfeld is starting a $55 art poster company. [NYT]

— How Artsy is Rahm Emanuel?: “Does Rahm want to be successful and do big things for the city? Yes. I don’t care if it’s for the sake of his ego,” said gallerist Rhona Hoffman of the Chicago mayor’s multi-million dollar arts initiatives. (She also cited his “early career as a ballet dancer.”) [TAN]

— Today in the Curator Shuffle: A slew of new curators have been appointed: Fabian Schöneich at Portikus; Fumoj Nanjo of the first annual Honolulu Biennial; Amy E. Froom for Islamic art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Ron Platt at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. [ARTNews, Art Radar Journal, Art in America, Artforum]

— Brooklyn Arts Boon: The city of New York has set aside $131 million in 2015 to fund arts initiatives with groups such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Mark Morris Dance Center, among others on the borough’s “museum row.” [DNAinfo]

— “I would just choose things that I think people would find interesting, and things that would, once people interact with them, be life-changing.” — Jeff Koons answers the question “What art would you put on the High Line?” in the blandest way imaginable. [WSJ]

— Jean Nouvel has announced his plans for the National Art Museum of China’s design. [Arch Daily]

— The Artists’ Legacy Foundation’s $25,000 prize goes to Mary Weatherford. [LAT]

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Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

— Scott Indrisek selected this week’s five must-see gallery shows.

— Danh Vo responded to the charges brought against him by collector (and alleged art-flipper) Bert Kreuk — which Kreuk then promptly rebutted.

— Thea Ballard spoke to emerging artist Gamaliel Rodriguez about his show at Walter Otero Gallery in San Juan.

— Eric Bryant highlighted 11 great artists at this year's ArtRio.

— Nina Katchadourian, famous for her airplane bathroom selfies that mimic classical portraiture, answered 21 questions in this week's Questionnaire.

— Anneliese Cooper shared rocker Nick Cave’s call for sentimental trinkets with his online “Museum of Important Shit.”

— Scott Indrisek reviewed Mike Kelley’s “Reconstructed History” exhibition at Skarstedt gallery in Chelsea.

— Anna Kats explored how the building that once housed Moscow’s largest restaurant will become the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

— The trailer for Emma Thompson's art historical film “Effie Gray” was finally released, offering a first glimpse of Dakota Fanning as the titular lead.

— Scott Indrisek asked Brian Finke about his experience traveling with and photographing US Marshals.

This Week's VIDEOS:

The Pan Pan Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Embers,” currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of its annual Next Wave Festival, veers toward the boundaries of theatrical production. Really, it’s hardly a theatrical production at all.

Which makes sense, since “Embers,” written by Beckett in 1957 (roughly a decade after he wrote “Waiting for Godot”), was created as a radio play, first broadcast on the BBC in June of 1959 and appearing in the pages of the Evergreen Review later that same year. Much of the work he was creating around this time — including “All That Fall” and “Krapp’s Last Tape,” among others — for the radio and the stage involved a process of stripping away theatrical conventions. The result was a refined version of his already minimalist style, where stage directions were spoken as dialogue, sound was pushed toward the foreground and became part of the rhythmic fabric of the piece, and repetition was embraced, sometimes abrasively and other times comically.

The other way the Pan Pan Theatre’s production of “Embers” tests the audience’s preconceptions of theatrical spectacle is in the complete removal of actors from the stage. Our only glimpse of actors is in the play’s first minute, which begins before the house lights even go down and features a group of seemingly random men and women wandering on the stage before one of them removes a sheet covering a large object, revealing a giant skull.

This skull, which sits in the middle of the stage and does not move, is where the action takes place. Around it hang wires that resemble icicles dangling from a ledge, and the only thing that signals the shifting of time is the light, which subtly slides through different configurations. The first voice we hear, and the voice that dominates the next 60 minutes of the production, is that of Henry, speaking into the void. We see nothing, only hear his anguished conversations with himself and others (his wife, mainly, although he rambles on about his deceased father and his annoying daughter), although it’s never clear if what we’re hearing is happening in some present day narrative or strung together through a variety of memories, reconstructed for our benefit.

And somehow, despite the absence of bodies and a discernable narrative, the entire production is never tiresome (although undoubtedly more than an hour of this would begin to wear an audience down). You’re never less than engaged, partly due to the unreliability and strangeness of what’s happening, and the Pan Pan Theatre group is wise enough to not only stick closely to what Beckett has on the page, but to push it further. In a world of theater that is dominated by revivals and formulaic new productions, it’s exciting to see something that truly moves from one moment to the next without any idea of which direction its heading. We just have to go back almost 60 years to find it.