Vajiko Chackhiani - Like Boxers Who Never Went Into The Ring

The installation is a family portrait of seven heads cast in concrete. At artist’s request pieces of obscure building’s foundation were ground, processed and mixed with concrete to cast the seven portraits. However, the faces of concrete heads are sliced off making it impossible to identify them. The erased facial features transform the family portrait into a universal, abstract family portrait. The visual starkness of cast concrete heads and erased facial features is a strong and disturbing commentary on family portraits. Emphasizing significance of family, the notion of family portrait and the family’s influence on individual’s psychological and personal formation According to the artist this piece is about education in a wider historical, social and political sense. It is about the role that family plays in individual’s development of knowledge. Family and parents’ experience serves as an inherited knowledge, its historical significance and its influence on path one takes in life and psychological configuration.

Vajiko Chachkhiani studied at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Universität der Künste (UdK) in Berlin with Gregor Schneider. He received DAAD scholarship in 2013, in 2014 won 7th Rubens Promotional Award from Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, Germany and was at Yarat residency in 2016. This year he has been shortlisted for Future Generation Art Prize at Pinchuk Contemporary Art Center in Kiev. Chachkiani’s work is in a number of private and public collections, among them Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Bonn, Germany. He has been invited to this year’s Istanbul Biennale curated by Elmgreen & Dragset.

In 2017 Vajiko Chachkhiani will represent Georgian National pavilion at the Venice Biennale.