Traveling Tales

Tamuna Chabashvili’s personal practice centers around the theme of archives and traces. Integrating personal stories, memories and questions into visual and tactile narratives is her own way of interpreting and questioning the legacy of the past and finding ways thanks to which “counter-memories” or “counter-stories” can embody the space of silence.

Each new project is an opportunity for the artist to work closely with vulnerable groups who very often remain under-represented or neglected. Textile proves to be the ideal space to recount these personal and collective stories that metamorphose into deliberately simple signs on the fibers. The distillation of these stories, rather than their accumulation, has only one purpose: the pursuit of the essence.

Based in Tbilisi and Amsterdam, Tamuna Chabashvili carried out her very first research project on gender-based violence against women in Georgia (Supra of Her Own) with anthropologist Agnieszka Dudrak in 2014. In 2018, her work The Book of Patterns (exhibited at the europalia georgia festival from October 14 to December 16 at Les Drapiers in Liège), focused on representations of women’s daily lives and was part of the Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art in Portugal. In 2019, she presented another project around historical archives at “The Corridors of Conflict. Abkhazia 1989-1995”, an exhibition organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Georgia.