The Tbilisi Triennial is the contemporary art triennial of the Republic of Georgia, founded in 2012 by the Center of Contemporary Art–Tbilisi (CCA-T) under the institution's founding director, the artist and curator Wato Tsereteli, and the Dutch curator and theorist Henk Slager, then dean of MaHKU at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design. The institution was conceived not as a conventional exhibition of finished work but as a platform for the dissemination of art education and research — and the inaugural edition, Offside Effect, made the argument explicit, gathering keynote artists alongside experimental academies from across the world to consider what art education could mean in the post-Soviet condition. That founding argument — that the southern Caucasus did not need another biennial of objects, but a structure in which the question of artistic knowledge production was itself the subject of the exhibition — has held across five editions and thirteen years.
The 5th edition, Peace Pandemic, opened in October 2025 and continues the institution's project-based, multi-curator working method. Across previous editions the Triennial has placed projects in conventional gallery rooms, in disused Soviet industrial buildings, in central public squares, in forests and in the institution's own reclaimed premises; the 2022 edition staged work at locations including the CCA, ArtArea, Cube In Context, the Rivers Magic Garden, the Goethe-Institut, the Khudadovi Forest in Tbilisi and at Uplistsikhe in the country's east. The wider working assumption — that the city, the country and the region together constitute the exhibition's working territory, and that the Soviet-era and post-Soviet built environment is itself an active curatorial medium — sits at the centre of how the Tbilisi platform makes its argument.
An institution built out of a question
The structural distinction between Tbilisi and the larger international biennials is that the Triennial was not founded by a state cultural ministry, a city council or a private foundation seeking civic prestige, but by an independent artist-led institution that asked, across a sustained 2010 international symposium organised with the Biennial Foundation under the title Does Tbilisi Need a Biennial?, whether the city ought to host a triennial at all, and on what working basis. The answer that emerged — that Tbilisi did not need another showcase but did need a platform for self-organisation, education and research — produced the founding 2012 edition under Slager and Tsereteli, who framed the programme around the figure of the ‘offside effect': the productive position of working from the margin of the established academic and institutional system, with the working assumption that the post-Soviet condition offered a particular vantage on the global debate about the function of art education.
The second edition, SOS — Self Organized Systems, opened in October 2015 and pressed the founding argument further. The framing thesis was that knowledge of community and of self-organised social units — units “formed through the agreement of their participants and functioning according to the norms of reciprocity, tolerance and trust” — was itself the working subject of the contemporary triennial; participants and collectives curated and produced their own projects, and the venue list included CCA Tbilisi, Gallery Nectar, the Literature Museum, Europe House, the Bethlemi district, Block 21 Rustavi, Art Villa Garikula, the Qvemo Matchkhaani Theatre and a field academy at Shindisi. The edition extended the working geography of the Triennial across the country and into reclaimed urban sites — among them the former Hippodrome recreational area, the Rooms Hotel underground parking lot and Gudiashvili Square in Old Tbilisi — establishing the pattern by which CCA-T's continuing programme treats the city's available infrastructure as the institution's working medium. In 2014 the Triennial became an associated member of the International Biennial Association.
The third edition, The Will, ran in October–November 2018 and again organised around a project-by-project structure with each project bringing its own curator; the framing argument was the productive force of volition as the “fundamental force of movement and evolution” in personal, societal, cultural, economic and global registers. The fourth edition, Microclimate/Education, opened on 1 October 2022 for a month-long run and brought together the institution's two long-standing strands — place-based practice and educational experimentation — under a single framing question: how the conditions of a working microclimate (an institution, a forest, a building, a community) determine what art education can become. The fifth edition, Peace Pandemic, opened in October 2025 against the geopolitical pressure of the war in Ukraine and the continuing question of the Caucasus's working alignment, with the institution's continuing decentralised programme distributed across CCA Tbilisi and partner venues in the city. The 2024 reopening of the State Silk Museum after a four-year closure for repair has added a further continuing institutional partner to the city's contemporary art infrastructure.
