MAIA NAVERIANI

Maia Naveriani (b. 1966, Tbilisi) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. She studied at the Tbilisi State Academy of Art under the class of Gia Edzgveradze. She was part of the artist collective Everything is Alright co-created by Gia Edzgveradze and peer artists: Tamara K.E., Keti Kapanadze, Thea Gvetadze. The artist collective focused on performance, happening and public interventions. In the early 1990’s, after the fall of USSR, Naveriani emigrated to London, UK, where she lived and worked until 2015.

Naveriani predominantly works on drawing, mostly using pencil on paper. She takes the signs and symbols derived from Pop-culture, Bible, Greek mythology, fairy-tales and classical literature and combines them with her personal immediate present, questioning a female subject within patriarchal society. Text is an integral part of Naveriani’s idiosyncratic pictorial language. Stemming from the overheard everyday conversations, advertisements and tabloid headlines, she takes the sentences out of their original context and creates a platform for critical reflection. Themes, such as: parenthood, domestic labor, emotional labor, pleasure and love from a perspective of a female body within heavily male dominated reality form the ever-evolving leitmotif in her body of work.  

In 2015, Naveriani returned to Georgia, where she currently resides. Here, her work gains wider political perspectives. She focuses on themes such as: emigration, work conditions and gender.

Based on the daily routine of sketching and diaristic narratives, Naveriani describes her practice as ephemeral and conceptual, free from a dogmatic truth. Her work rather lives on its own as a thought, an idea and more importantly a question mark.