An Archive of My Own is the product of a research project in Georgian Jewish History, which artist Nino Biniashvili conducted during her Prins Foundation Fellowship for Emigrating Artists and Writers-in-Residence at the Center for Jewish History.

For An Archive of My Own Biniashvili creates, following Virginia Woolf, a personal study: a room of her own. A wooden table, a chair, a lamp, and an indoor plant form a homelike atmosphere. On the table, a large picture book and an essay await the visitor. The picture book includes screen-prints inspired by the archival material Biniashvili reviewed during her research. Drawings hang on the walls and next to them slides are projected. The slides portray Jewish life and sites in nineteen seventies Georgia, USSR.

Visitors are welcome to sit at the table, touch the prints, turn the pages and read the essay as if they were looking through their old albums and readings their personal memoirs. Employing this form of presentation, Biniashvili breaks from a long tradition of displaying archival material in strict, glass cases. By thus defying common notions of archive and research, Biniashvili attempts to sustain the point of view of an artist in her historical investigation as well as to acknowledge and address her own history as a Georgian Jew who grew up during the last years of the Soviet Union.

Nino Biniashvili (b. Tbilisi, Georgia, 1980) is a visual artist. In her work, Biniashvili represents and analyzes the possibilities and problems of communication between cultures and people. She attempts to articulate the experience of living in a permanent state of otherness, the experience of lacking a homeland.