Group Exhibition - What Remains

Bukia Vakhania, 156 Kurfürstenstraße, 10785 Berlin, Germany

1 May - 20 June, 2026

Extended opening hours during Gallery Weekend Berlin
Saturday and Sunday, 2-3 May, 11:00-18:00

Bukia Vakhania is pleased to present What Remains, a group exhibition bringing together works by Zhanna Kadyrova, Nika Kutateladze, and Shabahang Tayyari. The exhibition will coincide with the Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Across painting, sculpture, and video, the exhibition unfolds through forms that remain visible even as the conditions that once gave them stability begin to shift. What is recognizable is not simply lost, but altered: it returns as trace, residue, substitution, or diminished presence. Though shaped by distinct geographies and experiences, the three artists share an attention to how broader social, political, and geographical realities settle into material, surface, image, and atmosphere.

Taken together, these works ask what endures after change has taken hold: what remains of sustenance after invasion and displacement have reshaped everyday life; what becomes of embodiment as the image gives way to surface, code, and interruption; and what is left of personhood as lived space slowly fades. In this way, the exhibition remains close to what Walter Benjamin describes as the trace: “the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be.”

Zhanna Kadyrova (b. 1981, Brovary; lives and works in Kyiv) works across sculpture, photography, video, and performance. Her practice is often site-specific and shaped by the symbolic and material properties of urban building materials. The exhibition presents Palianytsia, a sculptural object made from found river stone, alongside a video work from the same series. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kadyrova left Kyiv for the Transcarpathian region, where she developed Palianytsia in collaboration with Denis Ruban. Named after a traditional Ukrainian wheat bread whose pronunciation Russian occupiers often struggled to reproduce, the work draws on a word that became a means of distinguishing Ukrainians from enemies. While searching for accommodation and a functioning studio, Kadyrova collected smooth river stones and carved them into bread-like forms. Shown alongside the sculpture, a short film documents the making of the works and the artists’ everyday life under wartime conditions.

Nika Kutateladze (b. 1989, Tbilisi) approaches painting through a deep engagement with rural life in Georgia, where migration, depopulation, and fragile forms of coexistence have become central to his recent work. Trained in architecture before moving into installation, sculpture, and painting, he has developed a quiet visual language in which these broader realities are not stated directly, but emerge through atmosphere, surface, and restraint.

In the works shown here, the human figure remains visible, yet never fully settles into presence. Faces emerge pale, dimmed, and thinned out, as if something in the image has slowly receded. Rather than fixing identity, these portraits hold it in suspension, somewhere between appearance and withdrawal. In two of the paintings, a second face lingers beside the central figure, not quite separate and not quite absorbed, adding to the sense that personhood here is unstable and difficult to hold. The painting of corn extends this same atmosphere into the rural world, where sustenance appears not as abundance, but as something worn down and enduring. Across the group, Kutateladze gives form to a condition in which neither the figure nor its surroundings disappear entirely, but remain in a fragile, diminished state.

Shabahang Tayyari (b. 1987, Khalkhal; lives and works in Karaj) works across visual art and writing. Shaped by his father’s sign-painting shop, handmade calligraphy, grave-name carving, and the informal subcultural spaces of the 1990s, his practice explores anxiety and hope, innocence and corruption, through play, humor, and subtle manipulation. In the four gouaches on paper shown here, a recurring cropped torso-like form remains on the surface rather than resolving into a complete figure. Across the works, the body is never fully fixed, but appears as a shifting surface on which gesture, ornament, and symbol converge. Curving black lines move with an almost calligraphic rhythm, interrupted by sharper, more abrupt gestures. Eggplants and fruit appear throughout the works, functioning not only as recognizable objects but also as part of a coded visual language. Across the series, the image shifts between figure, ornament, and sign.