State Silk Museum is one of the few museums in Tbilisi, Georgia, that opened its doors to contemporary art and allowed artists and curators to exhibit in its permanent collection galleries. Nino Kvrivishvili’s exhibition Soviet Rainbow – From Textile Shop to Museum addresses the subject of this particular museum’s history and its connection to Georgian silk and Soviet textile industry. The curator of the show, Irena Popiashvili, collaborated with the artist on the concept and installed part of Nino Kvrivishvili’s works dispersed among the museum’s historical exposition.

The title of the exhibition Soviet Rainbow refers to the name of Soviet Georgian Silk factory. The artist researched now almost defunct textile industry’s fabrics and gave them a new life in her works. Kvrivishvili’s exhibition expands outside of the museum. During the exhibition banners and posters of the show will be placed around the city on specific sites where textile shops used to be in the near past. With this gesture, the artist demonstrates “From Textile Shop to Museum” path of her pieces in the exhibition. This act of anthropological mapping addresses public’s personal memories of the textile stores and invites to revisit them in the museum setting.

Nino Kvrivishvili researched and found in second-hand stores pieces of fabrics produced by Georgian textile factory Rainbow (Cisartkela) and combined them with the pieces of objects discarded during the renovation of the State Silk Museum, thus creating new body of work. For example, Kvrivishvili’s “Lady in Black” is an old oval shaped cardboard frame presenting Soviet-era “Krepdishin” overflowing its garment all the way to the floor.