A meeting with the Georgian artist Saba Khechoshvili

The Arsenal Gallery in Białystok invites you to a special event on 7 October, marking the conclusion of Georgian artist Saba Khechoshvili’s residency as part of the ARTIST IN RESIDENCE ARSENAL GALLERY programme.

2-4 pm – Open studio – informal visiting of Room 406, which served as the artist’s living and working space during his residency at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok (2nd floor, entrance through the Gallery office).

4 pm – guided tour of Room 406 with Saba Khechoshvili

4.30 pm – conversation with the artist in the educational room Arsenal Playground (ground floor of the Gallery, entrance through the reception desk).

Admission free. No registration required.

Saba Khechoshvili is a visual artist based in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied Visual Art and Design at the Free University of Tbilisi. His practice develops from an ongoing interest in the relationship between lived experience, behaviour, and space. He considers how everyday actions and ways of moving through and adapting to an environment are shaped by the spaces in which they take place. These experiences often become a starting point for working with existing environments and finding ways to register a presence within them.

In his previous work, space has often been experienced through conditions of limitation, occupation, and the need to adapt to what is already there. The current project begins from a different spatial condition. For a temporary period, he inhabits a space independently, away from his usual surroundings, allowing his attention to shift towards the objects, arrangements, and small changes that emerge through living in it. The room becomes both a place of inhabitation and a context in which different relationships to space can develop.

The project follows an attempt to organise the space, while the space itself continues to shape this process. What is already there and what is introduced, moved, changed, or removed begin to affect one another. The experience of inhabiting the room is formed through this exchange, with neither the existing environment nor the interventions remaining independent of the other. What begins as an attempt to establish an order becomes part of the way the space is experienced and recorded.

This also shifts the relationship between the interior and the city. In earlier work, movement through the city became a way of registering his own presence within it. Here, the position is reversed. The residential space remains still while the movement of the city is registered in relation to it. What was previously a point of departure becomes a fixed position from which the city is observed. The distance from the city is not simply a separation from it, but a different position from which its presence can be perceived.

As the space is prepared for presentation, a place shaped through inhabitation is opened to others. What was already there remains alongside what was changed and what accumulated during the stay. The room is encountered through these different moments at once, making the boundaries between living, observing, changing, and presenting less distinct.