Keti Kapanadze - Karma
Bukia Vakhania, 156 Kurfürstenstraße, 10785 Berlin, Germany
13 March - 18 April, 2026
Bukia Vakhania is pleased to present Karma, the first solo exhibition by Georgian artist Keti Kapanadze at its Berlin space.
Kapanadze is one of the key figures of contemporary Georgian art, whose practice played a decisive role in the formation and development of conceptual art within the local context. She belongs to the generation that emerged during the Soviet period and shaped an artistic language beyond official ideological discourse. For this generation, what mattered was not only the renewal of form, but a reconsideration of the very function of art itself. In her practice, art became a space where ideological narratives could be re-examined and an independent, critical position could be articulated.
In this sense, Karma can be understood as a continuation of that historical experience. Whereas in the past such resistance meant liberation from ideological discourse, today it acquires an ontological dimension, directed toward understanding the structure of being - namely matter and continuous transformation.
Karma brings together works from different periods of Kapanadze practice from early staged photographs such as Reading Shakespeare (2003) Harmonic Enterprise (2019–20) and recent large-scale aluminium works from the Karma series (2026).
Keti Kapanadze's humorous beings, entities situated somewhere between humans and elementary particles, allude to the origin of our beginning. Regardless of the medium, all her works are characterized by a lightness in which humor and seriousness are interwoven. Depicted as faces or molecular connections, they point back to the question of origin: to a fundamental property of our world- a cycle of entropy in which matter shifts from one state to another, dissolving every atom and every cell into disorder each second.
The photographic images attempt to find a constant, to interrupt permanence, and perhaps to create something new-establishing a new order, like a space empty of people yet filled with the imprints of objects as signs of presence that are not easily destroyed.
Represented as graphic connections of atoms, the objects made from disassembled 1960s flower tables or lacquered metal plates are inspired by two statements: one by Franz Brentano, Sigmund Freud's first professor, “Everything is chemistry,” and the other by Bernhard Riemann, “Everything is geometry.” These two statements converge on an invisible level, creating a platform for physical cosmology and the exploration of the nature of reality.
Keti Kapanadze (b. 1962, Tbilisi) while still a student at the Art Academy in Tbilisi, she produced her first conceptual graphical and photo works in 1983, she was the first female conceptual artist in Georgia in Soviet times. Since that time her works are part of the permanent exhibition of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the USSR at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, USA.
From 1990 to 1999 she worked abroad, supported by scholarships from the Sheffield City Polytechnic, the cca Contempora-ry Art Center, Glasgow, the BAK Swiss Federal Foundation, Berne, and the IAAB Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel. She also won First Prize in Photography awarded by the “Open Society Georgia” in 1997 in Tbilisi. She was also one of the editors of the Georgian art magazine “Signal” which she helped launch in 1998.
In 2000 Keti left her country for Germany, supported by the Baumann Stiftung. In 2001, she was invited as Visiting Professor for the Painting Class a Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. In 2007 she was awarded a scholarship by Cité des Arts in Paris, Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, Paris, France. Her works are in important European collections, such as: Museum Bochum; Stuttgart State Gallery; Ministry of Culture, Stuttgart; European Patent Office, München; State Art State Gallery Göppingen; MMoma Moscow. Today, Keti lives and works in Bonn, Germany and Tbilisi, Georgia.