Thrives on Discomfort / Shalva Nikvashvili

In a world where we’re all desperate to be liked, where our identities are polished, filtered, and perfectly framed for public consumption, Shalva Nikvashvili is here to remind us of the mess we’re hiding. The Georgian-born, provocateur has built a career by making you squirm, forcing you to confront the parts of yourself you’d rather keep buried. Shalva’s art doesn’t just “speak” to the viewer—it strips away their masks, forcing them into a raw, uncomfortable intimacy with their hidden selves.

Born in 1990 in Sighnaghi, Georgia, Shalva didn’t grow up in the embrace of artistic freedom. His parents were staunchly against his creative expression, suffocating any attempt to showcase his style, art, or even his sexuality. But repression breeds rebellion, and Shalva didn’t just push against these constraints—he broke them, shattered them, and now turns that same energy outward, daring the world to feel uneasy. Shalva’s work lives in the grotesque, the strange, and the unsettling. Let’s face it: we’ve become too comfortable, too satisfied with our curated lives. We smile, we perform, we pose.
Shalva? He’s the anti-performance performative artist. His art strips you down, reminding you that your comfort is nothing but an illusion—a fragile facade masking the turmoil underneath.
His multimedia creations delve deep into gender fluidity, trauma, and the existential questions we spend our lives avoiding. His characters, often grotesque yet strangely magnetic, reflect the complexities of identity in a world obsessed with binaries and categories. In today’s hyper-curated society, where self-expression often gets trapped in algorithms, Shalva’s work violently pushes against the grain. His pieces reject perfectionism and polish in favor of raw human experience, emphasizing that the uglier, uncomfortable sides of ourselves are just as real, if not more so, than the perfect personas we carefully craft.

But it’s not just what Shalva creates—it’s how he creates it. His performances blur the line between artist and audience, inviting viewers to step into the chaos with him, uncomfortably close. He’ll ask you the strangest, most probing questions at lightning speed, breaking down the walls of polite interaction until there’s nowhere left to hide. “We’re all performers of our own lives,” he says, but what happens when the mask slips? When the ‘performance’ of your identity falls apart?
Shalva thrives on this tension, especially when it unnerves his Western audience. “People are so used to nice and pleasant things,” he explains. “We have to smile at each other. We have to connect. But discomfort? People can’t handle it.” And he’s right. We live in an age where discomfort is seen as something to avoid, to escape from. But Shalva disagrees. He believes that only through discomfort do we truly confront ourselves. Only by hurting a little—emotionally, mentally—do we open up to a deeper, more vulnerable connection.
This is where Shalva’s art hits hardest. It’s not about pleasing the eye or feeding the ego. It’s about breaking down our superficial walls, exposing the dirty corner we all have, but refuse to acknowledge. His works reflect versions of ourselves we don’t show publicly—the parts we hide. And it’s this dissonance, between the carefully constructed self and the chaotic reality beneath, that gives his art its undeniable power.
His creative process mirrors this same rawness. Perfection is a human invention, a societal construct designed to cage creativity. Instead, he experiments, fails, and tries again, each failure bringing him closer to his next breakthrough. His work is messy, unfinished, and chaotic—much like life itself. Vulnerability, he argues, is the ultimate human experience.
And perhaps that’s what today’s society is missing. In an era dominated by curated images, instant validation, and an endless pursuit of perfection, Shalva’s art offers something uncomfortable but vital: truth. The kind of truth that hurts. The kind of truth that makes you think twice before you hit ‘like’ on yet another filtered selfie.
Shalva welcomes you to the discomfort zone.