Tbilisi’s Gallery Artbeat will become the first Georgian gallery to exhibit at Frieze London this year, showing work by the conceptual artist Keti Kapanadze in the Focus section.
This is the gallery’s first fair in the UK and comes in the run-up to Georgia’s elections on 26 October. The atmosphere in the country is tense, says Artbeat’s co-founder Natia Bukia, as the controversial and increasingly Russia-friendly Georgian Dream party vies to keep power in the face of pro-western opposition. “In Georgia we don’t have the luxury of having right-wing and left-wing parties—we have pro-Russian and pro-Western. So it’s very important to be showing our culture internationally.”
Artbeat was set up by Bukia and Salome Vakhani in 2014 as a peripatetic project space, later opening premises in Tbilisi in 2017. Exhibiting at fairs in Europe and the US has been important from the outset. “In Georgia, there are no institutions, so art fairs provide a platform for us to show Georgian artists to international curators,” Bukia says.
It appears to be paying off as Bukia says she has seen a marked rise in interest in the country’s art scene over the past year. A former Soviet state, at the intersection between Europe and Asia, Georgia is often missed out of group shows of Eastern European art, Bukia says. “We’re very different to our neighbours [Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey], Georgians are much more European.”
Artbeat’s Frieze stand features a wall installation made from wood and formica table tops, two aluminium wall sculptures, and three photographs by Kapanadze, who is described as the first feminist artist of the 1990s Georgian art scene. Prices range from €4,000 to €26,000.
Focus is intended for emerging names, so Kapanadze is an unusual inclusion. “She’s the first Georgian conceptual female artist and was pivotal in the formation of the contemporary art scene in the late 1980s and early 90s,” Bukia says. Civil war raged from 1991 to 1993 and the economic situation was dire throughout the decade. Exhibitions were self-organised by artists and often Kapanadze, a single mother, would be the only woman.
Today, Bukia says, the art scene has real momentum and she hopes bringing Kapanadze to Frieze will give her the international profile she deserves. But the war in Ukraine has been “very difficult for Georgians”, Bukia says. “It’s so sad to realise after more than 30 years that we’re still struggling against the same power.”