Keti Kapanadze

Keti Kapanadze is a pioneering feminist artist as well as the first Georgian conceptual artist, having created a multifaceted body of work ranging from conceptual drawings and sculptures to photography, video, and large-scale installations.

Born in Tbilisi in 1962, Kapanadze was raised in an all-female household by her mother and grandmother. Her mother is Lia Kapanadze (b. 1934), a distinguished Georgian theater and film actress who starred in დიდი მწვანე ველი [Great Green Valley] (1967), regarded as the first Georgian (Soviet) movie to depict an individual opposed to Soviet ideology. For this reason, the movie was censored, released in theaters at a later date following some redactions. Keti’s grandmother, Ketevan Zhizhilashvili, had two daughters, Lia and Elza. Her husband was a physician in World War II. During the war, she visited him in Siberia, and upon returning to Georgia, she left him, raising their two daughters alone as a single mother. As for Lia, she never married Keti’s father. Keti remembers being the only girl in her class at school with her mother’s surname. [1]             

Kapanadze attended Nikoladze Art College in Tbilisi from 1978 to 1982 and then studied graphics and painting at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts from 1984 to 1990.

She embarked on her artistic career in Tbilisi in the mid-1980s. While artist collectives such as Tenth Floor and the Marjanishvili Studio were active at that time, Kapanadze did not belong to any of these groups and was seldom invited to exhibit with them. In the male-dominated art world of Soviet Georgia, women artists were rare, even within avant-garde circles. They were often harshly criticized and, like Kapanadze, were frequently excluded from exhibitions or not invited altogether. In this patriarchal milieu, Kapanadze emerged as a source of inspiration and an example of an ambitious female artist, playing an important role in the Georgian art scene beginning in the late 1980s. Her work and presence challenged societal norms and encouraged other women to pursue their creative ambitions.

Kapanadze’s work centers her identity as a woman artist, a theme she has explored in various media, including photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Another underlying theme is the design of universal sign systems. In her Anima ex Machina series, the artist, as she herself explains, used a technique similar to automatic writing. She painted with black and white gouache on paper, paintings that were later transferred to cardboard. These works resemble technical diagrams and convey a sense of mystery. The artist believes that the blackness represents a space in which all information is stored, and her indecipherable sign drawings emerge from this realm. The series was originally created in the 1980s, during the Soviet era, a time when extracting meaning from Soviet newspapers was nearly impossible; the content was as indecipherable as Kapanadze’s black-and-white diagrams, which imitate the obtuseness of those publications. In 2003, the artist remade a number of the works, some of the originals having been lost by that time. 

The artist describes her creative process as conveying her subjectivity and experiences through the depiction of objects. Featuring items such as perfume bottles (Poison for a Couple, 1990, black-and-white photograph), a broken teacup (Home Story—Cup II and Cup III, 1990, black-and-white photograph), a dusty, old vanity (1901, 1996, black-and-white photograph), and a portrait of her pet parrot, the images in her 1990s photography series can be seen as self-portraits. Prior to this body of work, Kapanadze created a series of passport photos in which she wore different countries’ headgear or employed other interventions such as drawing a mustache on her face to reveal the constructed nature of identity, in this case national or gender. This series, titled Probable Need (1990), includes an image printed on canvas and painted over to transform the artist into a bearded Arab man adorned with a keffiyeh (Probable Need [Arab]). In another passport photo, Kapanadze time travels, donning an Egyptian headdress and identifying herself as Cleopatra (Probable Need [Cleopatra]).

Intriguingly, Kapanadze personifies the same theme of shifting time and place in Otar Iosseliani’s film Brigands—Chapter VII (1996), where she plays one of the six main characters. In this role, she performs a complex identity as a Russian aristocrat, an Eastern princess, and a Georgian revolutionary. The artist’s connection to the film is notable, as she was childhood friends with the filmmaker’s daughter, Nana Iosseliani. During the casting process, Kapanadze was present and was invited by the director to participate among many other candidates. This serendipitous encounter led to her role in Brigands—Chapter VII, which received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival. 

In 1983, Keti Kapanadze married fellow artist Gia Edzgveradze. Their daughter, Anna K. E., now a New York-based artist, was born in 1986. The couple divorced the following year. Kapanadze and Edzgveradze were married in a church ceremony, in defiance of Soviet law. They divorced when their daughter, Anna, was only ten months old. Since their marriage was not legally recognized, a divorce was unnecessary. Kapanadze moved out and took Anna with her, raising her daughter as a single mother with the help of her mother, Lia.

Between 1992 and 1999, Kapanadze participated in various artist residencies, each lasting between three and six months, at organizations including IAAB Christoph Merian Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, and Contemporary Art Centre (CCA) in Glasgow, Scotland. During this period, she produced numerous influential photo series including Hand V–VII (1994) and Game Over (1999–2002). In Hand V–VII, Kapanadze continues her exploration of the relationship between text and image, depicting hands holding random printouts of messages. Game Over employs a different strategy, printing black-and-white photos on aluminum and intentionally obscuring the image, revealing only details of a bigger picture.

In 2009–10, she created the Akasha Chronicles, a series of paintings titled after the Sanskrit word for “air” or “space.” The series features canvases layered with transparent material on which the artist paints, allows it to dry, then adds another layer of transparent material, on which she also paints. This technique resulted in exquisite canvases marked by a distinct spatial quality, reflecting on themes of death, time, and perception. In the paintings Ideal Death 1, Ideal Death 2, and Ideal Death (all 2010) and Akasha Chronicles 2 and Akasha Chronicles 3 (both 2012), the artist explores the concept of simultaneity by overlapping the images. Simultaneity has fascinated the artist since early on, particularly in how it relates to the collapse of time. The figures in these compositions appear to hover, prompting viewers to make associative connections between them.

In 2000, Kapanadze received a Baumann-Stiftung stipend and moved to Germany. The following year, she was a visiting professor at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany, and in 2021, she supervised diploma projects at VA[A]DS at the Free University of Tbilisi.

Irena Popiashvili

Photo portrait: Keti Kapanadze, Probable need (Gentleman), 1990. Photo overworked by hand, 120 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Notes:

1. Keti Kapanadze was raised by a single mother, which was quite uncommon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This familial dynamic set her apart from the conservative society of Tbilisi, influencing her independent spirit and shaping her views on gender roles and personal freedom.

2. My research included extensive interviews with the artists from the Tenth Floor Group, which later evolved into the Marjanishvili Theatre group, with a particular focus on the contribution of female artists. Only three women—Keti Kapanadze, Lia Shvelidze, and Manana Dvali—worked and exhibited alongside them, albeit not as formal members of the group.

3. Despite these circumstances, Anna maintained a relationship with her father and spent time with him during her childhood. Interview with Keti Kapanadze.