PRESS RELEASE

Caught between European visions of the future and an authoritarian turn toward the past, Georgia has held the status of an EU accession candidate since 2023. Around 80 percent of the population support joining the European Union, associating membership with a more stable economy, a growing middle class, and increased democratic participation. Driven by hopes for economic stability and democratic participation, young people, in particular, have been peacefully protesting in Tbilisi for years. De facto, however, accession negotiations have been suspended due to the government’s pro-Russian course.

The Georgian artist Zauri Matikashvili works within this field of tension in his documentary-artistic projects. Through the eponymous video as well as installations, the exhibition Made in Europe interrogates questions of belonging, economic constraints, and intergenerational conflict. For more than thirty years, the artist’s father traveled to Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, primarily to purchase Mercedes Sprinter vans and loading them with bicycles, leather sofas, or chairs at a low cost, which he then sold at a profit in Georgia, 4,800 kilometers away. The video work Made in Europe documents this strenuous journey and the process of commodifying of the items that Zauri Matikashvili’s father had transported to the Caucasus by container.
Created specifically for the exhibition, Matikashvili has produced an installation of five used doors. In the gallery, they become image-bearers of political dissent. They show graffiti from Tbilisi, adapted slogans from protests against a pro-Russian government and in favour of opening towards Europe. In Tbilisi’s public space, these messages are swiftly censored by the authorities and pushed out of view. The doors gather these traces into a relationship between private and public. What begins as an inner conviction unfolds here into the public realm and becomes legible, and takes shape, as a political claim to visibility. The graffiti thus condenses into a form of activism that preserves political urgency while protecting the tone and logic of the street. Their fragility remains part of the message.

The exhibition interweaves the accumulation of routes, materials, and writing into a physical, emotional, and political practice. In this density, the father’s heavy physical labor, the intergenerational relationship, as well as broader social and political processes of transformation are inscribed as lived experience. While large segments of Georgian society are pushing for European integration, the increasingly pro-Russian government responds with repression. This manifests itself in the restriction of civic freedoms and the systematic silencing of the opposition. Against this backdrop, Zauri Matikashvili’s works unfold as a quiet yet persistent counter-movement and a form of human poetry.