This work reflects on the fragile web of post-memory that haunts post-Soviet reality. When I came to Tbilisi in 2022, I was charmed by its streets and parks. Later, I discovered a book of texts by repressed Soviet writers and learned about the tragic fate of Paolo Iashvili. I realized that another, hidden layer of the city’s history still lingers.

For example, Vake Park was once a forest where, in the 1930s, political opponents were executed. This installation reveals how our reality is still inhabited by the ghosts of the Soviet past. Commemoration becomes a way to resist forgetting: to carry the weight of memory and to open the possibility of a different future.

Paolo Iashvili (1894–1937), a Georgian poet, took his life during a Soviet show trial. His suicide was censored, and he was declared an enemy. Only in the post-Stalin era was he rehabilitated, like many others erased by the regime.

Kseniia Gribiniuk
(b. 1996, Rostov Region, Russia) is an artist and curator based in Tbilisi since 2022.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and has taken part in numerous exhibitions and artistic projects across Armenia and Georgia.

Her interdisciplinary practice includes butoh performance, painting, and poetry, and centers on themes of memory, trauma, identity, the body, and queerness. Merging philosophical inquiry with irony and humor, her work often unfolds through improvisation.

Since 2025, she has been curating the Ortachala Art Residency in Tbilisi.