TIKA SHELIA OF AROUND THE STUDIO ON DESIGNING FOR COLLECTIVE ACTION

Georgia-born Tika Shelia, one-half of interdisciplinary, Tbilisi-based collective Around the Studio with Ano Jishkariani, transforms objects based in collective action into functional, everyday items. Take their School Chair — a post-Soviet Georgian public school chair adorned with a silver bird figure on top, a vernacular design seen on the gates of homes in the western regions of Georgia, and a hallmark of the studio that appears on many pieces of their furniture. The chair’s cushion is made from Georgian felted wool, which upholsters all of Around the Studio’s furniture, and is a foundational source of inspiration for their practice — Georgian women still gather wool in the high mountains and felt by hand, and this wool, which is also transformed into a kind of wall decoration, is one of the country’s most important cultural exports. Before Shelia moved to New York to study industrial design at Parsons, the duo presented Conspiracy Bar at Kunsthalle Tbilisi in 2024, which exemplified the studio’s political underpinnings. Imagining the home of a young protestor of the 2023–2024 student encampments, Shelia and Jishkariani furnished a rented apartment with objects that reinterpreted the material world of the demonstrations, like a shield or a barricade, into pieces that encourage reflection and collective action. They made a lamp with the same green laser that protestors used to shine into the faces of riot police and as a means of communication with one another on the streets. “By incorporating symbols of protest into an intimate setting, we wanted people to think about how external struggles influence personal spaces,” Shelia says.