Pobeda
Installation

Although titled Pobeda—the Russian word for “Victory”—the installation is constructed around a GAZ-21 Volga, a Soviet automobile that serves as both a historical artifact and a symbol of imperial legacy. The title is deliberately ironic, challenging the very idea of victory in the context of war, occupation, and human loss.

Loaded onto the roof of the vehicle is a towering accumulation of everyday household belongings: furniture, toilets, mattresses, clothing, and other domestic objects. These items evoke the contents of homes abandoned by civilians who were either forced to flee or were killed during the wars in Georgia. Rather than anonymous debris, they represent fragments of interrupted lives, private histories, and destroyed communities.

The installation refers to a well-documented reality of war: the looting of civilian property by occupying forces. Household possessions were taken from homes in the occupied Georgian regions of Abkhazia and Samachablo (South Ossetia), as well as during the 2008 war in Gori, becoming grotesque “trophies” of military conquest. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the widespread circulation of images showing Russian soldiers transporting stolen household goods profoundly resonated with Rekhviashvili, recalling scenes that Georgia had experienced decades earlier.

For the artist, these parallels reveal how patterns of violence, occupation, and dispossession repeat across time. The domestic objects stacked on the Volga are not simply symbols of theft; they embody the absence of those who once lived with them. Each chair, mattress, or article of clothing becomes a silent witness to displacement, loss, and the erasure of ordinary life.

By transforming the Soviet-era Volga into a vehicle carrying the remnants of stolen homes, Pobeda overturns the language of triumph embedded in its title. Instead of celebrating conquest, the installation exposes the moral emptiness of a “victory” measured by the destruction of civilian lives and the looting of their most intimate possessions. It is a work about memory, historical repetition, and the enduring human cost of occupation.