Story as a Woven Carpet – Groupshow

68projects is pleased to present Story as a Woven Carpet, a group exhibition of seven artists currently living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia. The exhibition is comprised of cultural fragments and addresses new narratives constructed in the young artists’ work.

Georgia has long been exoticised throughout history, from Ancient Greek accounts to travel narratives of the 20th century. What others have said and thought about the country has been collected in Georgian textbooks and taught across generations. The artists presented in this exhibition tell stories from their own perspective. They represent a generation that has begun creating and narrating its own stories—similar to Demna Gvasalia’s SS19 Paris show.

These 21st-century Georgian artists choose their cultural and visual references via the internet and computer screens, accessing information beyond physical borders and discovering new ways of seeing and creating. Everything is available at once, without the linear time evolution typically described in art history, and without adherence to traditional canons of good and bad. At the same time, their work remains inspired by their immediate environment and is less disconnected from local traditions than it might first appear.

The exhibition title refers to Nino Kvrivishvili’s eponymous work. Kvrivishvili creates handwoven wool tapestries that resemble large-scale paintings. Before the advent of the textile industry, carpets were woven in nearly all regions of Georgia. The wool used for the work carries a real-life story: the artist purchased a fragment of an old rug from a Tushetian shepherd who sold it in order to buy a Nabadi—a traditional felt winter coat. She then bought wool from the shepherd and wove this story into the carpet using abstract elements. The finished tapestry, bearing black abstract details as well as the artist’s name and completion date, tells the story of its own creation.

Tezi Gabunia’s Breaking News: Flooding of the Louvre presents fake news that could be true. Increasingly climate-change-related natural disasters reach the Louvre, referencing the Paris floods of 2018. Gabunia uses a model of the Louvre from his earlier work Put Your Head into Gallery, in which viewers placed their heads inside models of famous museum galleries. By flooding the model—his own artwork—the artist addresses cultural residue, recycling, and media-driven perceptions of catastrophe. The work is accompanied by a video titled Breaking News, showing water slowly flooding the museum interior. The effect is convincing, threatening, and deliberately fake.

Tamar Nadiradze draws inspiration from her surroundings and the people within them, though she considers herself her main source of inspiration. Her works are based on real-life stories transformed into fairy-tale-like watercolours and collages, reminiscent of children’s books or folktale illustrations. She addresses themes of urban life, pop culture, social behaviour, ecology, and human rights, filtered through a vision that is curious, surprising, and slightly unsettling.

Levan Chelidze paints an eclectic mix of portraits—both human and animal—still lifes, and landscapes of Georgia’s Racha region. In an age dominated by photography, Chelidze insists on traditional portrait sittings. He captures essential features while placing figures against imagined backgrounds. Clothing—or its absence—stems from the artist’s imagination rather than reality. His subjects are often beautiful, noble, and admired. Some portraits remain unfinished if sitters do not return, lending the works a disarming honesty and emotional openness.

Giorgi Qochiashvili’s imaginary landscapes and interiors are often populated by dark-skinned figures. Born in Gagra, Abkhazia, his family fled the region shortly after his birth due to war. His tropical imagery is based on family photographs and his grandfather’s nostalgia for the lost homeland. As a former rugby player, Qochiashvili traveled to South Africa, where he identified local landscapes and people with Abkhazia. This fusion results in the surreal, dreamlike quality and colouring of his paintings.

Salome Chigilashvili combines unexpected materials such as concrete, wooden floor tiles, knitting threads, and textiles, creating dramatic contrasts between image and material. She weaves patterns of traditional South Caucasian carpets directly into floorboards. Her work Untitled (2019) is an embroidered brown paper with white thread. Saul Anton has described her technique as creating a restrained “21st-century poor man’s modernism,” reflecting Georgia’s current condition—looking toward the future while unable to escape its ancient history.

The exhibition also includes Andro Eradze’s photographs from the Fireworks series, depicting colourful explosions in night skies. Framed in wood with shattered protective glass, the images appear to burst outward. By breaking the glass, Eradze transforms photographs into wall sculptures or objects with a mesmerizing presence.