ArtForum // Slavs and Tatars, Giorgi Khaniashvili
Giorgi Khaniashvili’s greatest fear may be turning into a stray dog. In the eight-panel ceramic relief Transformation, 2017, the artist depicts his metamorphosis from man, to jackal-headed humanoid, to masterless canine whose feral instincts compel him to abandon domestic life. For Khaniashvili, the threat isn’t in being a dog per se. It’s a figuration of the paranoia around what happens when one’s existence ceases to hold meaning for others.
Organized at Atinati by peripatetic project space Kunsthalle Tbilisi, this exhibition sets Khaniashvili’s figurative ruminations against Slavs and Tatars’ graphic printed matter, which gives trenchant visual form to the collective’s research around the linguistic and cultural evolutions occurring between the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China.
Image Credit: View of “Slavs and Tatars, Giorgi Khaniashvili,” 2022. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Tbilisi
