An Archive of My Own
October 2 – November 9, 2013

Meet the artist, Nino Biniashvili, on Sunday, October 6 from 12pm to 6pm.

In An Archive of My Own, Nino Biniashvili commits acts of artistic recovery. She rescues rare archival materials from obscurity and transforms them into compelling art exploring Georgian-Jewish experience. 

In an exhibition that challenges traditional methods of history-making, Ms. Biniashvili brings history home. She answers Virginia Woolf’s insistence that a female artist have access to a personal study. An Archive of My Own is Biniashvili’s “room of her own”—a space that feels at once domestic and revolutionary. 

A wooden table, chair and lamp, a large picture-book, a house plant and projected slides invite you into a world of actively engaging with the past for a meaningful experience of the present.

Ms. Biniashvili grew up in Georgia during the last years of the Soviet Union. As a Prins Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, she focused her historical inquiry on material available from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, one of the Center’s partners. The slides that she found inspired her drawings. 

In her art Ms. Biniashvili challenges borders between external and internal, collective and individual, historic specificity and timelessness. Her project explores the role an artist can have in investigating, interpreting and representing history—and the ways in which delving into archives can help us discover new things about our families and ourselves.