The works of Vajiko Chachkhiani are shaped by a poetic humanism that exists between personal experience and political reality as well as psychological explorations. Directly or indirectly, the point of departure for many of his works is an exchange of objects or actions between people. Chachkhiani condenses his subjects by using reduced forms in a subtle interplay between revealing and concealing. Parallel to his sculptures and installations he has developed a cinematic oeuvre ranging from the documentation of single occurrences to more narrative films that hover between dreams and reality.

Winter which was not there (2017) explores the relationship between the historical and the personal and its impact on the psychological formation of an individual. Set in somber Georgian scenery, the film unfolds around a monumental statue resembling an archetypal historical figure (a poet or a politician), but in fact with similarities to the main character, a man with a dog. The statue is hoisted out of the sea and dragged behind a car through rural and urban landscapes until it vanishes completely. There are subtle references to such cinematic genres as the road movie, and contains vague connections between the protagonist and the situations flashing past the car window along the way. The film implies a process of liberation from your own history as well from the historical circumstances while emphasizing the inner entanglement of the individual.

Vajiko Chachkhiani (born 1985 in Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Mathematics and Informatics before turning to Fine Art, which he studied at Universität der Künste in Berlin and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Chachkhiani represented Georgia at the Venice Biennale 2017 and recently his works have also been seen in Istanbul Biennial (2017), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2017) and Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes (2017).