His guitar has been lying unused in the corner for a month. “I don’t feel that way,” says Natuka Natsvilishvili, a 35-year-old Georgian musician and composer. “I’m depressed and I don’t feel like I have the right to sit at home and work on my music.”
Natsvlishvili has been a musician since the age of 15 and has recorded one album. But now his focus has changed. “My feeling is that we have to fight now,” he told DW. He explained that he believes the government of Georgia threatens not only his freedom as an artist, but also the freedom of the country.
Over the past year and a half, the Black Sea nation has seen waves of protests against the so-called, which began in May 2024. foreign agent lawWhich allows authorities to take action against foundations, independent organizations and media outlets.
This followed the victory of the increasingly authoritarian ruling Georgian Dream party in October 2024 parliamentary elections and the uproar over the new government’s decision to suspend EU accession talks just weeks later.
The populist, socially conservative government has meted out violence, arrests, and jailing protesters. The human rights organization Amnesty International describes this approach as “systemic abuse of the justice system to suppress dissent and maintain an environment of impunity for human rights violations.”
For example, in September, well-known actor Andro Chichenadze and 18 others were convicted of “inciting mass unrest” and sentenced to two years in prison for participating in pro-European demonstrations.
New law targets arts funding
Musician Natsvelashvili often takes part in protests outside the Parliament building in Tbilisi. She says it feels like the government is constantly passing new repressive laws.
“They can already put us in jail for standing on the sidewalk,” says Natsvilishvili, adding that fear and the daily struggle for basic rights are stifling creativity. “In the near future, there will be no room for art in this country. Free expression is no longer welcome.”
David Apakidze, a visual artist from Tbilisi, says: “Art is going backwards at the moment.” The 27-year-old is now also referring to the financial pressure felt by Georgian artists.
Many people depend on support from abroad, but since the implementation of the Foreign Agents Act, there has been great uncertainty among patrons and recipients. The law requires all media outlets and NGOs that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from foreign countries to register and identify themselves as “representing the interests of foreign powers.”
“It has become complicated to continue my work as an artist and still make ends meet,” says Apakidze.
Another law targets LGBTQ+ rights
He also creates objects made of stained glass that combine elements of Orthodox Christianity with queer identity – and thus finds himself doubly targeted by the Georgian government, which has long committed to fighting “LGBTQ propaganda.”
In 2024, it passed a law that severely restricts the rights of sexual minorities and aims to end “the promotion of same-sex relationships”. For Apakidze, this meant that Project Fungus, a queer artist collective he co-founded in 2020, had to shut down. “With all these new laws, it was just too dangerous for both us and our financial backers to continue operating,” he says.
Apakidze has also been the target of hostile lawmakers, one of whom described a book he wrote for Project Fungus, which looks at 100 years of queer art in Georgia, as “misinformation and LGBTQ+ propaganda.”
Shortly afterwards, Apakidze and his colleagues were told that the planned book presentation had been cancelled. “It was a very scary situation,” Apakidze recalls. “But we went ahead with the book presentation at another venue, because we knew that if we didn’t do it now, we would never do it.”
concern and solidarity
Mary McGuinness also has direct experience of this narrowing public discourse. The screenwriter runs a theater collective in Tbilisi with colleagues. A photo of a performance featuring two scantily clad women and cats fighting each other sparked hateful comments about the theater on social media.
She says, “There were terrible insults below the belt. Another post said that we were not real Georgians, that we were influenced by the West. So now I don’t share anything on social media that could be considered provocative. But I don’t even know what is provocative anymore. These days it can be anything.”
McGuinness also described seeing unknown men coming into the theater to look around. Since then, she says she wonders at every performance whether there are people in the audience who are monitoring what is happening in the theater.
Megwinite recently spent some time at the Residenztheater in Munich and is now returning to Georgia. His theater in Tbilisi is still open, but he suspects the authorities will make life more difficult for him and his colleagues.
Can she imagine going abroad? It’s an option, she says, because she can’t envision the situation improving in Georgia in the near future. “On the other hand, it would be strange to give it up,” says McGwinnett. “We have all these political prisoners, you can’t just let them go. They’re in jail completely by chance, but it could just as easily have been me.”
This article was originally written in German.