Michal Chelbin

In Samaia, Michal Chelbin brings together portraits made across nearly two decades, tracing a persistent fascination with adolescence, ritual, tradition, and belonging. From young dancers in Georgia to cadets, prisoners, and teenagers in Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Poland, and the United States, her subjects inhabit spaces where individual identity meets the structures and expectations of a larger group.

The title takes its name from a traditional Georgian dance performed by three women. For Chelbin, Samaia also suggests an identity that is multiple rather than fixed: something shaped by inherited traditions and collective memory, yet continually remade in the present. The photographs move through this tension—between past and future, discipline and vulnerability, performance and everyday life.

Bringing recent photographs from Georgia into dialogue with previously unpublished images from earlier bodies of work, Samaia reveals a thread that has quietly run through Chelbin’s practice for years. Her portraits resist simple explanation. Instead, they occupy a suspended space in which costume, gesture, landscape and gaze become clues to the shifting relationship between who we are, the roles we inhabit, and the communities to which we belong.