Permitted Vulnerability

Gvantsa Jishkariani is an artist and curator from Georgia, currently based in Madrid. This exhibition "Permitted Vulnerability" marks her first solo presentation in Spain. In her practice, she has for years developed a distinctive visual language grounded in the study of the visual culture of post-Soviet countries, with a particular focus on East European. She is interested in the aesthetic forms of a bygone era: decorative art, the urban landscape shaped by the political transformations of the 1990s in which she grew up, including mosaics, propaganda murals, everyday interior design, and jewelry. The artist deliberately engages with the categories of kitsch and popular taste, drawing on aesthetics that are often marginalized or dismissed. Her practice includes experiments with craft techniques—working with textiles, mosaics, wood, and metal.

For several years, she has consistently developed a series of textile works based on decorative, bourgeois tapestries. She subjects them to processes of destruction and reconstruction: tearing, deconstructing, and then reassembling them, adding embroidered slogans. Language itself—phrases such as The Language of the Unheard, False Compassion, and History of Shame—forms the core of her practice. These slogans draw from different registers: the language of political protest, popular culture, and academic jargon. Their meanings remain fluid and contingent on the context in which they are presented.

Jishkariani's works resonate with the current political and media landscape, marked by the experience of polycrisis. Rooted in the traditions of text-based art and strategies of appropriation, they operate primarily on an affective level, triggering intense and often ambivalent responses. This is a practice with a distinctly punk, at times "trashy" character: uncompromising, funny, and deliberately disruptive of aesthetic comfort. Its aim is to generate tension—a sense of rupture that exposes the contradictions embedded both in language and in social reality. At the same time, this gesture is about reclaiming control: taking hold of the very topics and aesthetics that once shaped her, and reshaping them through her own hands.