#Georgia #Switzerland, Two Georgian galleries present at Art Basel Art Fair, June 19-22, 2025
In the Premiere section LC Queisser presents Tolia Astakhishvili, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili and Simon Lässig.
The overarching principle of the presentation is the notion of boundarylessness between bodies, images, authorship, and narratives. Tolia Astakhishvili's architectural construction is merged with a photo-object by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, as an inner layer is Simon Lassig’s screen-based work marked by transparencies, stillness, and halted movements.
In the Statement section Gallery Artbeat presents installtion of Georgian artist Nika Kutateladze. Through a compelling interplay of painting and spatial transformation, Kutateladze turns the booth into a fragmented domestic interior—an evocative, site-specific installation that echoes a typical living room in a depopulated mountain village in western Georgia. The experience begins with a narrow corridor, guiding visitors into an enclosed, home-like environment. Yet, this space is more layered than it first appears. Its walls carry more than they enclose, offering access to unseen dimensions shaped by memory, dream, and displacement. At the installation’s center lies a raised wooden platform painted in dark reddish-brown. Its surface is partially broken, with missing or misaligned slats—suggesting neglect, collapse, or abandonment. The structure closely resembles the traditional wooden floors typically found in village homes, invoking a sense of rural domesticity now left to decay. Along one edge, sharp metal spikes protrude, injecting a sense of threat or disruption into the familiar domestic setting. Nearby stands a sculptural object in the form of a door, marked by a wave-like cutout. Framed in gold-beige and filled with a soft, translucent material, the door neither opens nor leads anywhere. Instead, it becomes a symbolic portal—pointing toward a concealed realm where the boundaries between dream and reality begin to dissolve. This threshold leads not into another room, but into another state of consciousness.
At Basel Social Club Gallery Artbeat presents works of Georgian artist Maia Naveriani. ‘For almost two decades I have been working predominantly on drawings. The act of drawing for me is a very delicate exercise, requiring deep intuitive trust in process itself, whether it is small scale works where the signs can appear very directly and quickly, or large scale works that demand a complex psychological and technical approach. It is this full intuitive flow and irrational approach to the language of drawing that transcends me into an- other, ultimate and yet unknown space with no past or future, just the intangible present and the countless possibilities to investigate and reflect on it’ Maia Naveriani.
