Natalia Nebieridze, “Stand,” 2024

The summer of 2024 was marked by a general sense of exhaustion. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and under the guise of “peace” and “tradition,” Georgian Dream (the country’s ruling party since 2012) had begun cutting EU ties, suppressing critical thought, and passing anti-LGBTQ+ laws, [1] also announcing a country-wide program of resource extractivism. [2] This isolationist policy drove the country deeper into poverty and paralyzed its debt-driven economy, which is reliant on Western aid. Following years of on-and-off mass protests against an oligarch-led push to adopt the Russian strategy of labeling all foreign-funded beneficiaries as “foreign agents,” the cultural sector, like so many others, faced an authoritarian, depletive future. [3] After another wave of sleepless nights, Tbilisi’s local art community clung to everyday life in anxious anticipation of the looming October elections.

On August 4, 2024, a small crowd gathered outside Artarea Gallery, a project space in Tbilisi. Natalia Nebieridze’s performance there, Stand, was not widely announced. An architect and the founder of Material Hunters Collective, a local group known for its critical performances and multimedia installations, Nebieridze rarely calls herself an artist. Focused on researching Georgia’s Soviet architectural and industrial heritage, she presents a new intellectually dense piece every few years. The first thing one saw when entering Artarea Gallery that day was a piece of purple-red graffiti on the wall facing the entrance, which read: “We’ll bleed your soul dry!” Givi Targamadze, who was part of the ruling elite during Georgia’s violent United National Movement (UNM) era, introduced this slogan during the 2007 protest crackdown, and was heard shouting it across all media. [4] It later became coopted as a political symbol of my generation, and of Georgian millennials, triggering the memory of rapid, large-scale neoliberal reforms marked by privatization, deregulation, and the reduction of public services that justified inequality and eroding labor and environmental standards in the name of progress and modernity. While Georgia’s modernization and anti-corruption efforts of that era gained international praise, they were also accompanied by authoritarian policing, the marketization of education, rural displacement, and the sidelining of older generations in favor of a narrowly defined, GDP-driven vision of progress.

A thick red line on the gallery floor – matching the color of graffiti on the wall – led to Natalia Nebieridze and her mother, Bella Romelashvili, a painter affiliated with Georgia’s post-Soviet abstract art scene of the 1980s and ’90s. The two stood barefoot on a small wooden cube, embracing in silence. At times, they rotated slowly, whispering, adjusting their positions, their toes overlapping. Nebieridze’s fragile body met Romelashvili’s grounded presence in a mutual hold; it was unclear who was supporting, guarding, or cradling whom. Occasionally, the two winked or smiled at friends entering the room. There was no fourth wall – their gestures didn’t seem staged, but sincere, as if they belonged to a quiet moment in life rather than a performance. As the audience, we were witnessing a generational exchange of care, a beautiful interdependence, while our minds echoed “We’ll bleed your soul dry!” This was a premonition of the brutal chaos to come in the near future; of our worn-down bodies, exhausted from relentless resistance, and of capitulating to primal insecurities under threat and seeking shelter in our parents’ arms only to find we must become their shelter by time’s command – the bitter inescapability of growing up. Right behind the artists’ stormbound embrace, a white wall carried an abstract painting by Romelashvili – signifying the precious cultural inheritance our elders have passed down to us, like a secret knowledge or skill that tells us how to make, imagine, and belong. At this moment in time, it felt somewhat misplaced, its depth and meaning rendered irrelevant. Stand mourned the poetry we are no longer able to inhabit under repression, the impossibility of making art in survival mode.

“SOS,” Window Project, Tbilisi, 2025

A month later, the far-right Georgian Dream claimed a false victory, purportedly with 54 percent of the overall vote. By December, we lived in a dictatorship: water cannons, tear gas, unknown chemicals, and attacks by masked police in broad daylight – even in front of children or inside churches. Homes were raided, and anonymous threats and violence from hired gangs became routine. Journalists faced harassment and assault. Since November, when Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced the suspension of EU membership negotiations, over 280 people, including women, minors, and disabled individuals, have endured beatings and psychological abuse; [5] at least 486 civilians have been arrested. [6] New improvised laws have been passed, allowing detention without charge, banned protest symbols, criminalized dissent, and stripped parliament of its oppositional members. From then on, thousands of citizens have faced fines or charges, while public workers have been fired or blackmailed by the administration. State institutions have stayed silent. Police involved in crackdowns have been awarded medals. The protest, to this day, is still standing.

Most contemporary art galleries closed their doors in December as part of a large-scale strike, after which the entire art industry seemed to be out on the streets 24/7. In her former position as Minister of Culture, Georgian Dream politician Thea Tsulukiani (now a vice speaker in parliament) had already purged pro-European professionals from museums, fairs, theatres, festivals, academia, state culture houses, heritage sites, and international art committees. Only a few independent and privately owned spaces, commercial galleries, and small DIY hubs remained intact – sustained by pure passion, sales income, self-funding, donations, and occasional non-governmental grants. State-affiliated media and publicity departments framed Tsulukiani’s assault on the art scene as a measure aimed at “decentralization.” The official narrative cast the culture sector and its employees as elitist agents of unrest funded by the EU – privileged, nepotistic, and out of touch with “ordinary people.” A growing number of state-aligned influencers began co-opting leftist rhetoric in order to fracture solidarity and polarize public opinion, portraying the “culture class” as “neo-colonizers” who marginalized tradition and silenced the majority.

It must be said that Tbilisi’s contemporary art scene was somewhat exclusive for a long time, and that it was only just beginning to move beyond individualism and grapple with complex social reality when the current crisis hit. After decades of enforced collectivism that suppressed creative practices, artists fully embraced the freedom of expression – but with it came a neoliberal “catch-up” logic that saw practitioners, institutions, and galleries adopt market-driven models while a more local, independent focus began falling behind. And though several art spaces in Tbilisi still ran on money generated from inequity, the city’s independent gallery network in its entirety has always been extremely diverse in terms of class; if the art scene exercised exclusions, they were discursive, not structurally hegemonic. In fact, a consolidated “cultural elite” never truly established itself in Georgia – the transition from a Soviet planned economy to a capitalist one, combined with successive waves of political instability, revolutions, and war, continually disrupted the structures that would have been necessary to sustain one. As a result, power and class relations remained fluid. The instability of the post–Iron Curtain period has brought forth resilient informal networks of resistance, strengthened by Georgia’s deeply rooted traditions of mutual aid, further complicating the formation of a “ruling class.” Moreover, affected by the political and economic changes, the landscape of labor in the country was in constant flux, which has not only led to repeated waves of unemployment but also to fragmented professional identities. Having operated under precarious conditions for decades, the country’s art community has never evolved into an institutionalized field with sustainable careers and a functioning market. So in fact, Georgian Dream attacked a fabricated enemy that never truly existed.

In January of this year, the illegitimate government launched a normalization campaign consisting of large-scale public festivals and fake celebrations that were effectively imposed on the population, while public service broadcasters and other state-controlled media were pressured to limit their programs to entertainment. Despite immense pressure on their livelihoods, culture workers refused to abandon their protests. “I cannot imagine working in such a violent society – all my work will be futile,” said Dedica Bulia, the owner of Dédicace Gallery in Tbilisi, in an online interview with the news platform Business Media Georgia. “It is ethically unacceptable to look at art while people are being dehumanized down the street,” added Elene Abashidze, curator and owner of the E.A. Shared Space gallery, in the same conversation. [7] Spurred by such sentiments, culture workers gathered to come up with strategies for sustaining art facilities, with fairs urgently organized to support artists and staff. The concept of art as a business sector is barely two decades old in Georgia. There are few local collectors – first, due to low-income demographics, and second, because collecting is not culturally established locally, meaning galleries focus on international sales. Without federal grants and related forms of support, local artists and curators were already juggling admin, self-promotion, and creative work, often working multiple jobs to survive. When the strike wiped out a vital season for gallery sales, it hit them hard, while limited infrastructure and mobility barriers isolated them from global discourse. In this position, many were forced to choose from the following options: break the strike and return to business (work and exhibit), collaborate with the oppressor (align their projects to the government agenda), or abandon the field altogether.

Ioanna Tsulaia, “Untitled,” 2024

After having withstood quite dramatic episodes marked by drastic policing measures, the number of art workers and spaces on strike began to decline by the end of January this year. Gradually, more exhibition announcements and press releases popped up, but their tone was withdrawn, almost apologetic, as if murmured in embarrassment. Individuals I spoke to confirmed feelings of bitterness, failure, guilt, and numbness in returning to “business as usual.” The strike, existential in its pathos, dissolved – not because the underlying political grievances were addressed, but because survival demanded it. After a decades-long effort to position ourselves within the international art system, were we now witnessing artistic alienation under the capitalist demand for reproduction for the first time? It was one thing to work tirelessly while wearing the romanticized but still somewhat pretty hat of the “struggling artist” with purpose – a desire to achieve a certain lifestyle, or maybe a feeling of having a great artistic mission. It was something else entirely when this effort had no other meaning than the obligation to meet financial demands. Immense injustice reduces every vocation to a function.

“I no longer know what to do as a gallerist,” Abashidze told me. She felt her participation in collective transformation as a citizen was more natural – a way of being attuned to wider events, especially because rebellion is how Georgian society has been determining itself endlessly throughout its history. In the Georgian cultural consciousness, the impulse toward subversion isn’t a reaction but a joyful, almost daredevil drive. This spirit, which is tied to a long history of resisting oppressive regimes and colonial incursions, is woven into the very fabric of Georgian society – evident in all sorts of cultural expressions – serving as a record of a continuous, playful defiance against imposed systems of control. This profound sense of rebellion, which has the chaotic energy of a free-spirited party, is what the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili has called the “gift of illicit joy,” a feeling “unjustified by reality and therefore unlawful.” [8]

With authoritarianism on the advance, retreating into routine felt extremely wrong – especially as it meant surrendering to what art has, at least in its pure, idealistic form, long tried to resist: profit imperatives, the refusal of reality, and selling its soul. After all, what kind of art can be created by artists working against their own ideals? Bertolt Brecht, who had long been largely dismissed as part of a more fundamental rejection of Marxist beliefs, has resurfaced in the Georgian creative scene’s discourse in recent years. His famous quote from the Svendborg Poems circulated again: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” Perhaps as an attempt to justify the decision to get back to work, or as a gesture of insistence, however fragile, that art, as an impulse, will ultimately endure.

Mako Lomadze, “Armour,” 2024

Located just above Tbilisi’s central rally site, Corridor was the first art space to reopen after the strike, with a group show titled “Parallel to the Protest.” Featuring works centered around images of riots, political slogans, or traditional symbols such as crosses, flags, and the “golden fleece,” [9] the exhibition was reactive and convulsive – a replica of what happened down the street, on Rustaveli Avenue. “Anger is the only word I can use regarding all of this,” says Ioanna Tsulaia, one of the artists included in the exhibition, in a walk-through video presenting a series of portraits she drew based on photos shot as evidence by journalists and activists. They portray injured protesters – six portraits in a row, uniform in size and color combinations, torn straight from her sketchbook and presented without any additional materials. In a promo video for the same exhibition, Saba Mzhavanadze stands near his abyssal, nightmarish painting of a fragmented city scene, hints of the Parliament building visible in its background. He describes his work as an expressionist, visual decoding of impressions that surface before conscious thought, bypassing rational interpretation. Elsewhere in the show, Mako Lomadze’s straightforward symbolism addressed the situation with a realistic rendition of a knight’s suit of armor, placed among thorns.

Not far away, the Window Project gallery presented “SOS,” a group exhibition featuring 14 artists with a strong local and international presence, which struck a more commemorative tone. Responding to a sense of urgency, the show excavated and explored the history and intersectional dimensions of political abuse in a variety of artistic mediums. The photographer Dato Koridze, who works in both journalism and art, documented the darkest hours of the recent December rallies; his video collage Noise (2025) depicts fists and stones pounding against the cold iron barricade erected in front of the Georgian Parliament, amplifying the rift between the governed and those in power. Sandro Antadze’s OSCE/ODIHR Report (2025) rendered the Parliament building in monochrome gray on a blank field of dove white, expressing the collective disappointment in international institutions and the fading significance of the lieu de mémoire. With his large-format painting the The Big Party (2025), Tato Akhalkatsishvili presented a radiant, surrealist ode to the cyclicity of cruelty and splendor: a Christmas tree strung with body parts, rising from a bloodied carcass. Though part of a long exploration of this symbol, the work evoked the government’s grotesque staging of holiday lights on the blood-stained Rustaveli Avenue, a shallow act of surface decoration that had to be guarded by riot police.

“Tezi Gabunia: Closed,” 4710, Tbilisi, 2025

Tezi Gabunia’s gallery exhibition “Closed” at 4710 was read as a guilt-driven confession by many. The artist shut the entrance to the space with a cage – viewers could not enter or engage with the works, which he had created in isolation amid his struggle with depression and substance addiction. “I was in the hospital fighting death while the country was in rage,” Gabunia told me in a personal conversation. “I could hear these sounds in my head all year, but I couldn’t join protests physically – all I did was paint.” Viewing the exhibition from a distance, what we saw behind the bars of the cage was mostly color, clashing with an intensity reminiscent of Martiros Saryan’s paintings. Gabunia experimented with perception, saturation, and scale – questioning the very exhibitability of his work while at the same time posing the question of to what extent it was even worth presenting. “Life threw me into a crisis, and I wasn’t ready to show you my art. I was too vulnerable to open up and be exposed. I existed, but I couldn’t bear to be perceived,” he told me.

The question of how art can be made and exhibited under the current conditions in Georgia also arose in my conversation with Elene Abashidze. Walking me through her venue, E.A. Shared Space, the curator emphasized time as a material and resource, and the special role it plays for her in responding to the political situation:

If there is one cardinal principle in art, it is knowing when to stop – and this gallery needs to end now. I cannot stretch it any further. Such are these times – the gallery barely matters. There are far greater challenges that I, as a gallerist, feel powerless to confront. Of course, economic realities are undeniable: popularizing contemporary art, even locally, let alone internationally, has been a sustained struggle for years. Now, according to the narrative of Georgian Dream, accepting the only available funding makes one a “foreign agent,” which is beyond me. My curatorial work and the gallery’s program are only truly earnest if they’re profoundly critical, offering a genuine impetus for change. A future exhibition could contextualize the humanitarian crisis in Chiatura, [10] for instance, and perhaps this can happen in five years. But now? What exhibition, with its current content, could possibly change anything for starving miners’ families? For now, I am closing the space. I choose silence, but I stand in solidarity and will help in any other way I can.

Mariana Chkonia, “Untitled,” 2024

The final exhibition E.A. Shared Space staged before its closure was Mariana Chkonia’s “Sky Vine.” At the time, Tbilisi’s May rain showers were dulling the days, so the artist’s monumental textile pieces, many of which were positioned to catch natural light, could not be experienced in their full force. The wool that spread across their extensive surfaces – sometimes in its natural color, sometimes pigmented with shades reminiscent of Mediterranean frescos – was riddled with knots, needles, and gaps that exposed a sheer layer of organza. The delicate fabric holding the pieces together was soft as a veil, imbuing them with a remarkable airiness. Against this backdrop, the heavy tapestries transformed into something ethereal; however stiff and large in scale, they seemed ready to fly away.

When asked about Chkonia’s work’s connection to the current political moment and the protests, Abashidze told me how the artist had retreated to her studio to make these pieces – postponing an exhibition that had initially been scheduled to be held during the peak of the riots and deciding to show the works only months later. The press release for her show does not mention this fact, nor does it address the political situation in any other way. I kept looking at the pieces – tender studies of sacred, historical handcraft from the Caucasian highlands – and saw a discreet farewell to an irretrievable ethos, a search for a truth about collective identity conducted through a focused, uninterrupted practice. The wool, long valued for its healing properties, stretched beyond my height – and beyond my grasp. And though I never saw the sky vine that Mariana said canopied her studio, I like to think it was a quiet nod to all those who haven’t had the time or stillness to look at the clouds or trace the branches that sway over rooftops and courtyards – an homage to everything that has not been painted, sculpted, sung, performed, or simply encountered, because the conditions didn’t allow it.

Natalia Nebieridze, “Cessna 185,” 2025

Nebieridze’s Cessna 185 premiered on April 26, 2025, following Stand, thus forming the final piece of the trilogy. By then, all art venues in Tbilisi had called off the strike and reopened, with most focusing on personal, introspective themes. At an emerging, still-unnamed art space housed within a residential home, Nebieridze’s father, an artist by training who had always dreamed of piloting the Cessna 185 Skywagon, lay face down on the wooden floor, his arms outstretched in a wingspan or cruciform pose. Around him was drawn a chalk outline of a plane, reminiscent of a technical illustration. Nebieridze lay atop her father’s body – her smaller figure on his back, mirroring his disposition. “He couldn’t pursue art since he had to support us all his life and even leave Georgia in search of financial stability,” she said. “In the end, he wasn’t able to pursue flying either.”

Elene Pasuri is a Tbilisi-based art manager, curator, author, and activist. Her practice primarily involves organizing and managing creative cultural experiences, campaigns, and educational programs. The politics of art and artistic representation, creative pedagogy, and socially engaged, participatory art practices are the main interests steering the direction of her work.

Image credits: 1. Courtesy Natalia Nebieridze, photo Nuci Nebieridze; 2. Courtesy of Window Project; 3. + 4. Courtesy of Corridor Art Space; 5. Courtesy Gallery 4710, photo Ika Khargelia; 6. Courtesy Keti Chikovani and E.A. Shared Space; 7. Courtesy Natalia Nebieridze, photo Salome Lezhava