Behind the Scenes at “Dinner - A ‘Performance’ by Shalva Nikvashvili
On July 12th, Georgian multidisciplinary artist Shalva Nikvashvili carried out a ‘performance’ titled “Dinner,” commissioned by ADA.PERFORM, an artistic platform fostering encounters between artists, audiences, institutions, and emerging scenes within contemporary art culture. The performance also included the presence of artists Jenna Marvin and Marie Polo.
The work took its cue from the familiar image of family dinners and domestic display, using the ritual as a stage for tension: between the intimacy of a shared meal, political censorship, queer social life, and the performance of daily life.
At “Dinner,” the table becomes a space where censorship and memory collide. Shalva’s work questions what happens when trauma, past experiences and the unspoken accumulate but get edited out of the familial conversation. What is suppressed never vanishes, but lingers as memory, language, and unspoken weight.
For Shalva, the banning of dinner does not merely represent the elimination of food, but the withholding of memory. It means silence, and the presence of the unspoken. It equals a system of compliance.
Words: Sara Vukosavljevic