State Silk Museum presented a solo show by Nino Kvrivishvili, curated by Irena Popiashvili. 

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.

Nino Kvrivishvili is a young Georgian artist living and working in Tbilisi, Georgia. She has exhibited extensively in Georgia and abroad. Her recent shows include the artist’s solo exhibitions at Gallery Melike Bilir, Hamburg, Germany and KKKC, Klaipeda, Lithuania; her work was included in group exhibition 21st Century Georgian Artists at Popiashvili Gvaberidze Window Project, Tbilisi, Georgia. Nino Kvrivishvili was part of the Achterhaus Residency in Hamburg and KKC Residency in Klaipeda, Lithuania. In the fall of 2016 the artist will be part of Binz Residency in Zurich, Switzerland.

Project is realized in the frames of the “Regional Art and Culture Project in the South Caucasus”, which is managed by the Culture and Management Lab with financial support of the Swiss Cooperation Office for the South Caucasus (SCO).