Riga Contemporary 2026

Presented Artists: Tamar Botchorishvili, Tamuna Cahabshvili, and Maia Naveriani

For Riga Contemporary 2026, Bukia Vakhania brings together works by Tamar Botchorishvili, Tamuna Chabashvili, and Maia Naveriani, three Georgian women artists whose practices reflect on the body, memory, language, and the often invisible structures that shape women’s lived experiences. Working across textile, drawing, and wall-based wool work, this selection explores how private experience becomes visible, how tradition is re-read, and how the female body and voice are interpreted, marked, and reclaimed.

Tamar Botchorishvili’s wall-based wool work places a nude female figure at the center of the composition: a body presented outside fixed social, cultural, or symbolic definitions. Her posture is calm and direct, yet the figures and signs surrounding her create a field of tension around the body. The weapon, the observing figures, the animal, and the external gaze appear as metaphors for the mechanisms through which society reads, controls, and assigns meaning to the body.

Particular significance is given to the eyes placed in the figure’s palms. They suggest self-observation and the possibility of seeing oneself from within. Here, the gaze is no longer only an external force directed at the body; it returns to the body itself, transforming it into a witness of its own experience. The work opens a space for reflection on the body, power, and identity, asking a fundamental question: to whom does the body belong — to the one who inhabits it, or to those who continuously observe, interpret, and define it?

Tamuna Chabashvili’s practice often explores the relationship between memory, domestic space, women’s labour, tradition, and the invisible structures that shape women’s lives. In the presented works Supra of Her Own and The Book of Patterns, the artist uses textile, pattern, and collective memory to connect personal experiences with broader social and cultural histories.

Supra of Her Own is a collaborative project dedicated to the invisibility of women’s painful experiences. Developed with anthropologist Agnieszka Dudrak and in close collaboration with women survivors over one and a half years, the project addresses the topic of domestic violence in Georgia. Its starting point is the Georgian supra, a traditional feast central to everyday life and collective memory. Although women are usually responsible for preparing the feast, men are associated with its most visible roles, such as toasting, speaking, singing, and reciting poetry.

The word supra also means tablecloth, an object traditionally decorated and preserved by women within families. These tablecloths, marked by stains, mends, and traces of use, carry personal memories that often remain invisible. Chabashvili collected worn family tablecloths and used them to create an installation in the form of an apartment, where public and private spaces overlap. Based on emotional maps made during meetings with women, the installation included rooms such as the wedding room, the room of hesitation, the childhood room, the room of explosion, and the room of help/stigmatization. The project was also translated into a publication and blog, extending the physical installation into a two-dimensional space.

The Book of Patterns is a hand-printed textile sample book inspired by the traditional Georgian Blue Tablecloth. By tracing the daily activities of women, many of whom labour on the street, the work draws a parallel between traditional tablecloth decoration and the socio-cultural patterns that shape and often violate women’s lives. The artist creates new patterns based on photographs circulating on local social media, engraving them one by one onto woodblocks as silhouettes. Referring to the original woodblock printing technique used for the Blue Tablecloth, which arrived in Georgia together with indigo through the Silk Road, Chabashvili brings traditional pattern-making into a contemporary social context.

Together, these works transform textile and pattern into tools for making hidden experiences visible. They connect domestic objects, women’s stories, and inherited traditions, opening space for new narratives to emerge.

Maia Naveriani’s practice transforms drawing into a space of language, critique, and resistance. Working across coloured pencil, watercolor, text, and neon, she takes fragments from pop culture, mythology, advertising, everyday speech, and patriarchal clichés, then reorders them into unstable, humorous, and psychologically charged images. Her work does not simply depict the female subject; it questions the visual and linguistic systems through which femininity, labour, desire, memory, and power are produced.

In the presented works, including drawings from the series Authentic Behaviour and Freedom of Speech, Naveriani continues her investigation into how language and behaviour are formed by cultural expectations and social codes. The drawings move between private thought, visual note, joke, confession, and critique. Words and images do not create a fixed narrative; instead, they form an unstable field of signs where the female subject can speak, resist, perform, and reimagine herself.