Nikolozi Nika Koplatadze: Miwa (მიწა)
Curated by Charles Moore
(Espacio) Union
Unión 221 col. Escandón. Ciudad de México.
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Opening
Saturday, February 7
12 – 10 pm
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Cocktail at 6PM
Miwa, a Georgian word meaning earth and soil, names not a place but a condition of becoming. Written here in the Latin alphabet, the word holds a slight displacement, mirroring the exhibition’s refusal of fixed geography. What emerges instead is a terrain formed through memory, material, and relational structure rather than cartographic location.
Notably absent in Miwa is the human figure. Yet these works are not empty. Trees, mountains, flowers, the moon, and the sun appear as individual presences. Each bears its own identity, psychology, and internal logic. These are more than landscapes, but ecosystems felt from within. Nature here is neither backdrop nor resource; it is a living, organizing intelligence.
Painting meets object, sculpture, and installation through a process of interlayering. Tempera, applied through touch in thin, liquid layers, retains the integrity of the pigment’s original color, emphasizing intimacy and tactility. Sculptural works draw on traditional Mexican craft techniques and organic materials, including soil gathered from different regions, flowers, seeds, plant matter, and pineapple skin, each carrying the temporal weight of centuries of living processes.
Wholeness becomes the exhibition’s central inquiry. Logic is uncovered in natural formations, such as the geometric scales of a pangolin, the aggregation of leaves into a tree, the way singular elements assemble into a larger, coherent body. This structural principle extends outward, echoing the formation of societies. Collectivity emerges not through sameness, but through the alignment of distinct parts under shared conditions of meaning, identity, or belief.
Miwa reinterprets macro-ecosystems as intimate systems of relation. It asks how landscapes shape us, how complexity sustains life, and how wholeness might be achieved by remaining irreducibly plural.
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