The Story of a Thread Seen from the Window

The Why Not Gallery, in collaboration with Fabrika Tbilisi, presents The Story of a Thread Seen from the Window, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Georgian artist Erekle Chinchilakashvili.

📅 Opening: June 20, 6:00–8:00 PM
🗓 On view through July 30
🎟 Free admission

📍 The Why Not Gallery, Fabrika Tbilisi Courtyard
8 Egnate Ninoshvili Street, Tbilisi

🕛 Gallery hours: 12:00–8:00 PM, daily except Mondays.

About the Exhibition

The exhibition originates from the gallery's new location and the history of the Fabrika building. By investigating the site's past, the artist enters into a dialogue with the space itself. His inspiration comes from one particular historical layer: during the 1970s and 1980s, the building housed the Nino Garment Factory.

This urban history becomes the narrative foundation of the exhibition, connecting it to the collective memory of Ninoshvili Street, the surrounding neighborhood, and the left bank of the Mtkvari River.

The project is built around a literary text featuring two fictional characters whose memories unfold into paintings, architectural references, and visual symbols. The works engage with the traditions of Tbilisi portraiture, 16th–17th century Dutch painting, the legacy of David Kakabadze, and the visual language of Tbilisi itself. The pheasant appears as a recurring symbol of the city's mythology and collective memory.

Continuing his long-term research into art history, Chinchilakashvili explores how historical images transform over time and across contexts, questioning how we perceive them today and what connects historical symbolism with contemporary visual culture.

The exhibition unfolds across four interconnected layers:

• Literary text;
• Painting;
• Spatial installation;
• Video essay.

A metal framework, inspired by the building's architecture, reduces the exhibition space to its structural essence, while paintings based on memory and imagination inhabit this architectural skeleton. The result is a dialogue between architecture, history, and contemporary artistic experience.

The accompanying video essay incorporates television archive footage from Georgia during the 1970s and 1980s. Through editing, familiar urban images take on a dreamlike rhythm, while archival Georgian music merges with compositions by contemporary musicians VAZHMARR and Tete Noise, creating a shared emotional landscape across different periods of time.

The exhibition's title refers not only to the former sewing factory but also to the thread as a metaphor connecting architecture, time, memory, fictional narratives, and artistic media.

About the Artist

Erekle Chinchilakashvili (b. 1992, Tbilisi) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Budapest.

He holds an MA in Scenography and a BA in Art History and Theory from the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Artistic Research at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where he also teaches.

His practice explores the fragile boundaries between reality and imagination, investigating memory, perception, cultural identity, and social anthropology through painting, installation, and video. By layering archival imagery, personal visual material, and historical references, he constructs emotionally charged pseudo-realities that invite viewers to reconsider how memory is formed and transformed.

His work has been exhibited extensively across Europe, including solo and group exhibitions in Budapest, Oklahoma City, Tbilisi, Paris, and Berlin.