12. Irakli Sabekia

‘Artistic work has a great power to make complex subjects approachable. It allows us to put down our shields and let the world affect us,’ says the Amsterdambased Georgian designer Irakli Sabekia, whose projects take on weighty themes such as spatial justice to spark powerful conversations. ‘I think of my projects as artistic interruptions of functioning systems, aiming to create possibilities for the re-evaluation of existing structures,’ adds the Design Academy Eindhoven graduate. One of his most notable projects to date is Spring (pictured), a 2017 installation consisting of

50 oak seedlings growing on ash produced by burning books; it symbolises new ideas ‘unburdened with the weight of bygone ideologies’. More recently, Sabekia has been exploring memories of spaces that have been erased. He will be exhibiting at Eindhoven in October, as part of the Geo-design platform. iraklisabekia.com