Whose City? Street Art and the Performance of Belonging in Tbilisi, Georgia

Join us in the Vandenberg Room (2nd floor) at the Michigan League for a presentation by Greta Uehling, a 2025-26 Faculty Fellow with the Center for World Performance Studies (CWPS).

Street art is often understood as a form of cultural resistance in politically constrained societies like Georgia. Professor Greta Uehling will draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Tbilisi, including interviews with artists, activists, and viewers supported to explore the forces that complicate its communicative potential. Uehling extends a Barthian approach that foregrounds the reception of street art and the contested meanings that emerge around it. In this talk, she will explore the state’s appropriation of street-art aesthetics through government-sponsored projects, as well as private citizens’ power to veto murals on their buildings. She will then turn to gender as a contested terrain where Georgia’s European aspirations meet enduring social norms. This research was supported by a Faculty Fellowship from the Center for World Performance Studies.

Presented by the Center for World Performance Studies with support from the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

FACULTY BIO

Greta Uehling’s scholarship is broadly concerned with international migration and forced displacement. Major projects have examined the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and the internally displaced. Her current project explores the subjective experience of military conflict and forced displacement in Ukraine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, she documents how the military conflict reconfigured social worlds and how these social worlds became the site of a different, everyday kind of war.

Prior to teaching in the Program on International and Comparatives Studies, Uehling consulted with a number of international organizations including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Uehling holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan. In 2004, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book is Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars. Her forthcoming book is Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters.

Expert Advisory: Dr. Uehling is an expert on Ukraine and can discuss the war in Ukraine and its implications.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact the Center for World Performance Studies at [email protected] at least one week in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the University to arrange.