Georgian artist and writer Karlo Kacharava was feverishly prolific. A polymathic figure living in Tbilisi of the late 1980s and early ’90s, he produced paintings, essays, poetry, and art criticism as if possessed by some secret knowledge that his would be a short life: He died in 1994 of an aneurysm at the age of thirty.

“People and Places,” curated by Sanya Kantarovsky and Scott Portnoy, offered a glimpse into Kacharava’s idiosyncratic visual universe, full of spirited melancholy and fervid discipline. He assimilated a dizzying range of enthusiasms—from Georgian art history to rock music, Futurism

Why don’t more contemporary exhibitions ask questions about “the meaning of existence”? I mean it. There is (of course?) no meaning, but the visionary fortunes and futures we might hazard are many, which is to say the meaning is what we make, and the world we live in is part of this, made by us too. If we don’t accept what we’ve been given, told, circumscribed by, can we think and make our way out? Can we turn staid structures and beliefs on their heads to generate some brave new alterity with infinite horizons, first ideological and then, someday, practical, real?

“Cosmic Mothers,” curated by

On three separate nights during the opening week of his exhibition “Sated Soldier, Sated Peasant, Sated Scribe,” Sam Keogh gave a live performance outdoors. Script in hand, he unraveled the flamboyant story of an artist undergoing questioning by UK border guards, who suspected the traveler of attempting to smuggle cigarettes through London Stansted Airport. In doing so, he wove fiction together with fact: The guards had mistaken a series of folded paper collages by Keogh for cigarettes; these very collages were installed in the Centre for Contemporary Art’s basement as part of Keogh’s show. As