"By bringing together the two historical touchstones EIN DIALOG and GEORGIA ON MY MIND, Fragments of Transition offers a reflective analysis of 1990s Georgian art, probing transnational identity, cultural dialogue and the experimental forms born of a shifting political landscape. Transition here is not a linear passage but a fragmented, ongoing re-configuration of identity and artistic expression."
- Mariam Shergelashvili, art historian, 2025
Forgotten footnotes and headline statements of late-Soviet Georgian art converge in Fragments of Transition, Art Foundation Anagi's inaugural research exhibition. Anchored by two now-legendary German shows - Georgia on My Mind (Cologne 1990) and Ein Dialog (Berlin 1994) - the presentation revisits the decade when Perestroika cracked the Iron Curtain and independence cracked the nation itself.
The display assembles large-scale canvases, mixed-media experiments and archive fragments by eight artists who negotiated that collapse in real time: Luka Lasareishvili, Iliko Zautashvili, Alexander Bandzeladze, Koka Ramishvili, Mamuka Japharidze, Guela Tsuladze, Gia Rigvava and, via catalogue traces, Gia Edzgveradze.
Their strategies range from Conceptual détournement and neo-expressionist fury to quietly political icon-making. In the absence of functioning state structures, art became an ad-hoc civic forum-one that forged "new cultural formations" from rubble, blackout and war.
Central to the exhibition is the private collection of German gallerist Françoise Friedrich, whose advocacy spirited these works abroad and preserved them until their first Georgian showing today.
Reuniting the paintings in Tbilisi allows contemporary viewers to read them not as exoticised "Eastern" curiosities, but as lucid commentaries on globalisation's early tremors. As Shergelashvili writes, the 1990s transition "is approached not as a linear progression but as a fragmented and ongoing reconfiguration of identity".
By placing experimental gestures beside documentary traces, Fragments of Transition reframes the 1990s not as a finished chapter but as an unfinished argument, one that still structures today's debates on East/West binaries, soft power and the task of culture in states of emergency. With this show Art Foundation Anagi claims its mandate: to return exported histories, platform Georgian voices and examine the plural modernities forged on the country's fault-lines.