Guram Tsibakhashvili
17.10 – 18.12 2026
Sveavägen 43, 6th floor
Stockholm
Indoors, Outdoors – Tbilisi takes place on the 6th floor of the ABF building at Mint’s office space. Open by appointment only until 18.12. Contact: info@m-i-n-t.se to make an appointment.
Curated by Elene Abashidze
The exhibition Indoors, Outdoors – Tbilisi brings together documentary photographs taken by Guram Tsibakhashvili between 1987 – 2000. Through his lens, Tsibakhashvili captures the capital of the newly independent Republic of Georgia during and in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Two recurring motifs structure the selection of photography: the interiors and exteriors of Tbilisi. The photographs document the remnants of urban life—objects, signs, and lifeless street furniture—in a city marked by extreme poverty and instability. The city’s vitality has shifted indoors, finding shelter in exhibitions, fashion shows, rock concerts, and social gatherings hosted in the homes of artists and their allies. It is as though the promise of the ideological transition from the post-communist to democracy, initiated immediately after the collapse of the communist regime, has moved from public space into the private sphere.
To describe the subject of Tsibakhashvili’s photographic gaze, the idea of non-space coined by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben discussed in his seminal work State of Exception (2003) is probably well-fitting. Such spaces emerge during periods of political and juridical disruption, when established systems collapse and uncertainty gives way to chaos. The photographs form an archive of this suspended reality, capturing Georgia in the aftermath of conflicting ideologies, civil war (1991–1992), and ethnic conflicts, including those of 1992–1993 and 2008. Through this contrast between interior and exterior spaces, Tsibakhashvili’s photographs document a period of uncertainty in which the promise of collective transformation coexists with the fragility of everyday life.
Guram Tsibakhashvili (b. 1960 Tbilisi) is one of Georgia’s most important documentary photographers, known for his powerful visual documentation of Georgia’s social, political, and artistic life. Starting his professional journey after graduating from Tbilisi State University in 1982, Tsibakhashvili first worked in chemistry, but soon turned his focus to photography. By the late 1980s, he was photographing the streets of Tbilisi and experimenting with fine art and documentary photography. Today, Tsibakhashvili is recognized not only as a witness of Georgian history, but also as a teacher, curator, editor, and mentor. He has also played a key role in building Georgia’s photographic and cultural infrastructure.