Elene lapiashvili, Dusty Window | 10 Jul - 04 Aug 2026
In 1998, the poet and architect Shota Bostanashvili began the construction of the Palace of Poetry at 47 Amaghleba Street, in Tbilisi. Three kinds of towers, like three ornamented vases, of ambiguous scale. Neither sculpture, although largely hand-carved by their author, nor fully architecture: looking at the images available online, it is impossible to assign them any identifiable function. And yet something in their stature seems to belong to the order of the monument. This hybrid site remained unfinished for ten years, before being purchased and destroyed by a real estate development company. In February 2013, Shota Bostanashvili opposed to the bulldozers the poems that his monument would never house.
Since the late 1990s, Georgia, newly emerged from the USSR, has been marked by a wave of privatization in the construction sector. In Tbilisi, numerous residential projects, sold off-plan, promised to renovate the city, to modernize its streets, to replace the inherited forms of the Soviet past with the visible signs of a liberal future. Many of these promises remained unfulfilled, leaving behind concrete carcasses, architectures without use, ruins of a future that never took place.
Nostalgia can be approached in several ways. It may first accompany an attitude that seeks to collect the elements of a vanished past in order to reconstruct from them a coherent, reconciled image. It may also inhabit the one who, turning toward a lost past, accepts being led astray.
Elene Lapiashvili’s installation When no one is looking, draw on dirty windows presents, across five cathode-ray televisions, five variations of a video made by the artist, whose editing and slightly asynchronous diffusion disturb any narrative unity. We see ruins, urban silhouettes, roads, construction sites, and the moon appearing, multiple. On the back wall, a kind of optical bas-relief, Interiors, presents the diffracted image of an interior space.
Elsewhere, a model rises, as timid as it is ambitious. On other walls, two photographs: one shows a silhouette of the city of Rustavi; the other presents a UFO, captured by the artist when she was a child. Finally, the orphaned caption of a reproduction of a painting by Bruegel, in the form of an index: a constellation of numbers on the page, without any referent other than its own title.
Deeply marked by the urban landscapes of her native Georgia, Elene Lapiashvili develops an economy of unstable forms: the plan, the model, the interior, and the urban fragment refer less to a linear historical discourse than to regimes of appearance and the production of memory. Nostalgia here takes on a reflective form: it remains distant from origin, preserves traces, and deliberately seeks out interruptions and gaps. From this emerges a certain strangeness, in which the familiar persists almost as a ghost. The archive, here, is not simply a pre-existing repository to be displayed in order to point to this or that historical detail: it is produced by the work itself, through fiction and through the forms the artist gives it. To lose oneself, then, and to construct narratives in fragments; to search for signs and invent their meaning outside words; to inhabit these memories, both individual and collective, as places at once familiar and strange, where architecture hesitates between utopia and ruin, and where the gaze slips through, seeking its place, trying to grasp again what remains there of the human.
Elene Lapiashvili (b. 1999, Tbilisi) lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Dusty Window is her first solo exhibition.
