Gallery Artbeat presented Tamuna Chabashvili’s solo exhibition, ‘Guda-nabadi’ which was parallel to Oxygen Biennial 2021.

Tamuna Chabashvili’s practice revolves around the topic of archives and traces. She uses textile to mark or record trails of certain events from a personal perspective, turning it into a temporary platform or a space to convey one’s own story and resist disappearance.

In Tamuna Chabashvili’s projects, a body and the idea of a house often mingle and echo each other. On many occasions, a body becomes the tool to measure and recreate materials that are invisible to an external eye, yet that are still there and palpable under the skin, in the form of memories.

This time, the numerous layers of a personal and collective history of trauma and (forced) displacement take the form of minimal and deliberately simple signs, dense in their dryness. The works result from a process of removal and distillation, rather than the accumulation of traces and documents: there is a search for essentiality.

Each blanket with its bright colors and geometric motifs hosts specific prints, intentionally abstract at first sight. The titles of the pieces help us to identify what we are looking at, while the signs of use on the blankets are clues to the existence of layered history.

A map, a voice, a tent, a mantel. All the elements in the room are, indeed, somehow tools to position, ground, protect temporarily oneself: ways to create a home away from home, especially if in a new, unknown territory.

Taking the vulnerable position of a displaced person as her starting point, the artist’s work revolves around the idea of a ‘safe space’ in the form of a portable home. It is like ‘guda-nabadi’ (in Georgian ‘one’s belongings’) that shelters her creative processes, allowing her to gather experiences, process them and pass them on.

The new works displayed at the gallery were produced during the artist’s residency at AGA LAB in Amsterdam with the financial support of 'the Mondriaan Fund'.