Born in the capital of Georgia, within the framework of the former USSR, Koka Ramishvili belongs to the last generation of "Soviet" artists, whose work is strongly marked by historical experience and cultural awareness.
Koka Ramishvili was born in 1956 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and has been living and working in Geneva for over twenty years. His work has been shown in numerous cultural institutions such as the Tate Modern in London, the MAMCO in Geneva, the Goethe Institute in Berlin, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the M KHA Contemporary in Antwerp, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy and the Cobra Museum in Amsterdam. He has also participated in the International Documentary and Animation Film Festival in Leipzig, and the Cairo Biennial. Koka Ramishvili represented Georgia at the Venice Biennale in 2009.
After studying film and industrial design at the Academy of Art and Architecture in Tbilisi (1975-1980), Ramishvili turned to "documentary" photography in the 1990s, focusing on historical events related to the dissolution of the USSR and the Georgian coup (War from My Window, 1991-1992). According to him, Georgia was too tormented at the time for an artistic work based on formal reflection. That is why he prefers the "moving image" or the narrative thread of documentary photography at this stage. The elements of his life are "compressed, [...] decompressed and presented with the help of an image".
It was not until he arrived in Munich in 1990, at the studio of Professor Wolfgang Flatz, that Ramishvili found the creative environment necessary for a profound interrogation of the image and its possible metamorphoses. Without being satisfied with a simple formal analysis, Ramishvili instituted incessant back and forth between the document and the image, constantly forcing the boundaries of different media. Photography began to rub shoulders with video, installation, as well as drawing and painting, challenging the purity of modernist categories and the relevance of binary models, such as form-content, mind-matter, reality-appearance.
It is particularly from the 2000s and his arrival in Switzerland that Ramishvili's work becomes multidirectional, corresponding not only to social actions or political issues (Pronostic Eventuel, 1997-2000), but also to more intimate projects. His practice gradually becomes more refined, revealing the artist's reflections on the phenomenology of perception.
Koka Ramishvili represented Georgia at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He lives and works in Geneva.