Zauri Matikashvili - მზე შინა და მზე გარეთა / The Sun Inside and the Sun Outside’

Bukia Vakhania, 156 Kurfürstenstraße, 10785 Berlin, Germany

10 September - 24 October, 2026

Bukia Vakhania presents The sun inside and the sun outside / მზე შინა და მზე გარეთა, a solo exhibition by Georgian artist Zauri Matikashvili. Across a new video work, photographic stills and sculptures, the exhibition traces the shifting relationship between public life and domestic space under conditions of political and social pressure.

The exhibition takes its title from Matikashvili’s new video work The sun inside and the sun outside (2026). Developed in relation to the protest movements and broader political climate that have shaped public life in Georgia, the film moves between scenes of collective action and the domestic environment. Rather than treating political events as something that takes place outside everyday life, Matikashvili observes how they enter the home through images, conversations, architecture, and routine. Public and private space emerge not as opposites, but as interconnected conditions in which political experience takes shape.

Where the video moves between the public space of protest and the private sphere, two photographic stills pause within the domestic interior, holding on details that might otherwise pass unnoticed. In one, a broken wall reveals what lies beneath its surface; in the other, a bird’s nest rests above a curtain rail, quietly bringing the outside into the room. Removed from the movement of the film, these images make the home appear less fixed or enclosed, a space continually altered by what enters, settles, and leaves a trace.

This idea of occupying and marking space continues in a group of iron sculptures. Their open, skeletal forms hold space without enclosing it, creating a presence that is both physical and provisional. Pieces of wood are tied into some of the structures, interrupting the metal with a more irregular, organic material. The sculptures operate less as barriers than as spatial markers, defining a position while leaving its boundaries open.

A further sculptural work brings the question of space closer to the body. Its dense, irregular form, partly wrapped in fabric, feels at once protected and exposed. In contrast to the open geometry of the iron works, it occupies space through mass, weight, and physical presence. The shift between these different sculptural languages expands the exhibition’s sense of place from something marked around the body to something experienced through the body itself.

Across Matikashvili’s practice, space is never a neutral backdrop but as something socially produced. His work often begins with specific people and environments, tracing how broader social and political structures become part of everyday life. Migration, transnational movement, labour, and questions of belonging recur throughout his work, alongside his ongoing attention to neighbourhoods, cultural institutions, and contested public spaces.

Matikashvili looks at how the same place can be experienced from very different social positions, and how movement between places can reshape one’s relationship to home, identity, and community. Working in close proximity to the people and situations he observes, he allows different perspectives, tensions, and contradictions to remain visible rather than resolving them into a single point of view. More recently, this approach has moved closer to his own family and social environment, bringing wider political and economic realities into more intimate forms of experience.

In The sun inside and the sun outside, these concerns take on both spatial and bodily dimensions. The street is no longer simply outside the home; political pressure registers within domestic space, everyday life, and the body itself. Across video, photography, and sculpture, the exhibition brings these different scales into relation. Place emerges not as a fixed condition, but as something continually made and remade - entered, occupied, marked, protected, and exposed.

Zauri Matikashvili was born in the Georgian town of Qvareli. After studying fine arts in Münster and Düsseldorf, he now lives and works in Münster and Amsterdam. In his films, performances, installations, and sculptures, he questions the socio-cultural and political contexts of different societies and nations that shape the construction of identity in individual realities and families.

He is particularly interested in how narratives and images create community. He often focuses on people who otherwise receive little attention. His work fluctuates between observation, testimony, (media) creation and deliberate provocation. In many cases he combines video installations with objects made of ceramics, porcelain, wax, and metal, as well as found objects from nature. Besides, he experimentally coats ceramics with earth, metals, or dust.

Zauri Matikashvili's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions, for example at Off space BSMNT in Leipzig (2026), at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf (2025), at Kunst in Tunnel (KIT) in Düsseldorf (2025), at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster (2025), at Het Documentaire Paviljoen in Amsterdam (2024), at Antimatter Media Art in Victoria (Canada, 2023), at Art Matters in Hangzhou (2023), at the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (2023), in the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2022), at International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen (2022), at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2021) in Hamburg, at Münster Film Festival (2021), at HMKV in Dortmund (2021), at Atelier No. 63 PACT Zollverein in Essen (2020) and at Philara Collection in cooperation with Filmwerkstatt in Düsseldorf (2020).

Zauri Matikashvili was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Amsterdam (2022–2024), at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris (2022) and at PACT Zollverein in Essen (2021). He recently received fellowships from the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2025) and from the Kunststiftung NRW (2026). His works are part of the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany, the collection of LWL Museum of Art and Culture, and private collections.