2026 Projects
CRITICISM +VALUE, Experimental Pedagogy & Contemporary Art Space #1 & #2; a collaboration with and TIMM Architecture, and the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts.

The collaboration between Criticism + Value, TIMM Architecture, and the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts brings exhibitions to TIMM Architecture's meeting room at Kote Afkhazi 18/2 in Tbilisi. This partnership brings together distinct but complementary practices: C+V's experimental approach to pedagogy and contemporary art, and TIMM Architecture's design and research-oriented international network, and The Tbilisi State Academy of Arts' institutional structure, and students, to create a space that operates at the intersection of art, architecture, critical thought, and education. The shared venue is central to the collaboration's intent: by situating the gallery within an architectural firm's space, the project fosters ongoing dialogue about the inherent relationship between art and architecture.

These two disciplines are too often treated as sequential rather than simultaneous — the building gets made, and then someone is handed a budget to "activate" the space with artwork after the fact. Inherent in that model is an ethos that engages with the work of art like decoration, an afterthought bolted onto decisions that were already made without it.

The conversation that needs to happen is earlier — at the concept and design stage, when the big questions are still open. What is a space for in a deeper sense? Not just its program or function, but its character, its relationship to the people who will inhabit it, what it asks of them. Those are the same questions a serious artist or curator is grappling with. Introduced at the right moment, that perspective pushes back productively on assumptions about circulation, light, scale, and surface that otherwise get resolved purely through criteria internal to the discipline. Artists tend to think carefully about how people actually experience space — not as a floor plan or a section drawing, but as a body moving through a sequence of atmospheres, encountering objects, pausing, being uncomfortable or at ease. Architects who engage with that dimension early make very different buildings than those who encounter it only at the end.

This is where the inclusion of the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts becomes structural rather than symbolic. Students of architecture and students of art, brought into the same room at the same stage of inquiry, do not simply learn about each other's disciplines — they begin to develop a shared vocabulary for asking what a building is, before it becomes one. That formation matters. The architect who has spent time genuinely looking at art, arguing about it, sitting with it in silence, brings a different set of instincts to the drafting table. Not instincts borrowed from art, but instincts sharpened by the encounter.

The collaboration between Criticism + Value and TIMM Architecture is built on the premise that this adjacency should be a working condition, not a cultural amenity. The meeting room that hosts an exhibition is also the room where projects are reviewed, where design decisions get made, where the firm thinks out loud. Art is not brought in to decorate that process — it is present to complicate it, to slow it down in productive ways, to insist that the questions of meaning and experience are never fully resolved by technical expertise alone.

The question this collaboration investigates is: what would it look like to formalize this relationship in practice? Not an artist on an advisory panel consulted after the program is set, but genuine co-inquiry at the moment when the fundamental decisions about a building — what it is, who it is for, what it should feel like to be inside it — are still open and still arguable.

The inaugural exhibition, "Powerless In the Mist of the Juggernaut" assembles five etchings by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). Artworks made between 1899 and 1910, when Europe stood at the edge of catastrophes it could not yet fully name, will be exhibited in Tbilisi Georgia. These works have been assembled for appreciation, pedagogy, potential clarity and critique.

This modest exhibition is the first time artworks by Käthe Kollwitz have been exhibited in Tbilisi Georgia. They arrive here not from a museum vault, but from a personal ‘teaching collection’— objects that have spent the past three years as the subject of conversations with artists and students in America, and now Tbilisi, Georgia. These works have served as inspiration, aesthetic reference, opportunities for close looking, essay production, as primary sources, evidence, provocations and material—yes material. That origin matters. These prints have been looked at intensely, argued over, and sat with in silence. They carry that accumulated attention— from the hands of Kollwitz… to the gaze of over eighty students and now to the public in Tbilisi, Georgia.

May 16, 2026
Kote Afkhazi 18/2
Tbilisi, Georgia

Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I.