KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Festival 2026: The 25th Anniversary Edition Opens Across Tbilisi, May 1–4

There are cultural festivals that exist to celebrate what has already been established. And then there are festivals that exist to find what is coming next — to place the work of photographers who are working at the edge of contemporary image-making in front of a city that is itself living on a cultural edge. KOLGA Tbilisi Photo is the second kind of festival.

On Friday, May 1, 2026, Tbilisi opens the 25th anniversary edition of KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Week — the longest-running, largest, and most internationally recognised photography festival in Georgia, founded in 2002 and growing every year since into a city-wide event that transforms multiple venues across Tbilisi simultaneously into an extended, open, free exhibition of the best contemporary photography from Georgia and the world.

The festival runs from May 1 through May 4, 2026 — four days of exhibitions, masterclasses, seminars, discussions, and the KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Award ceremony on opening night, where the winners of the 2026 international photo competition are announced before an audience of photographers, curators, journalists, and cultural figures from across Georgia and beyond.

The exhibitions are free. The city is the gallery.

Twenty-Five Years of KOLGA: The Festival That Built Georgian Contemporary Photography

The story of KOLGA Tbilisi Photo is, in important ways, the story of contemporary photography culture in Georgia.

When the festival was founded in 2002 — in the difficult years following Georgian independence, when cultural institutions were rebuilding and international connections were being re-established — the ambition was specific: to create an annual event that would connect Georgian photographers to international practice, bring international photographers and curators to Tbilisi, and over time develop a photography community in Georgia that could operate at the level of the best photography festivals in Europe.

Twenty-five editions later, that ambition has been met and exceeded.

TBC Bank has been the presenting partner of KOLGA Tbilisi Photo for more than 20 years — a sustained institutional commitment to arts sponsorship that has been fundamental to the festival's ability to develop its international programme, its award structure, and its city-wide exhibition format across more than two decades of Georgian cultural life.

The festival is operated by Foto Klub Objektiv — the Georgian photography club and professional organisation that has served as the institutional home of the country's photography community throughout the KOLGA era.

The KOLGA Award 2026: $6,000 Prize Fund, Five Categories

The KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Award is described as the largest and most prestigious international photography competition in Georgia — and its scale makes that description accurate: the 2024 edition received submissions from over 500 photographers from around the world, totalling more than 800 photo projects.

The 2026 award categories are:

• Documentary Series — extended documentary photo projects; the category that rewards sustained, structured, contextually grounded photographic reportage
• Reportage — news and event photography; the category that directly engages with photography as journalism and contemporary record
• Conceptual Photo Project — the most open and most formally experimental category; work that approaches photography as a medium for visual ideas rather than documentation
• Single Image (One Shot) — the competition for individual photographs; arguably the most immediately accessible category and the one that attracts the broadest range of participants
• Mobile Photography — a category that reflects the reality of contemporary image-making: the best photographers working on phone cameras produce work that deserves evaluation alongside work made on professional equipment

Prize fund: $6,000 USD total across all categories

Submission fee: $30 USD per project

The competition closed for entries in March 2026, and the shortlist for the One Shot (Single Image) category was publicly announced on April 2, 2026. The winners across all categories will be announced on opening night, May 1.

The Exhibition Programme: Tbilisi as an Open Gallery

The photography festival that KOLGA Tbilisi Photo has built is not confined to a single building or museum. It is distributed across the city — across artistic venues, cultural centres, galleries, and non-conventional spaces in the neighbourhoods that form Tbilisi's creative geography.

This is the format that makes KOLGA Tbilisi Photo genuinely different from a conventional photography exhibition: the city-wide distribution means that following the full programme requires moving between Tbilisi's neighbourhoods, discovering venues that visitors might not otherwise encounter, and experiencing contemporary photography in spaces — historic buildings, converted industrial spaces, contemporary galleries — that themselves contribute to the meaning of the work on display.

Exhibition Types

International exhibitions — the festival brings curated photography from international practitioners; past editions have included documentary photographers, conceptual artists, and photojournalists whose work represents the current state of the medium in its most diverse global forms.

The 2025 programme (the 24th edition) included:

• "Fleeting Narratives: Street Photos 80s–90s" by Charles Ford — archive documentary street photography from a transitional era
• "Reinterpretation" — a conceptual photography project
• Multiple other Georgian and international exhibitions running simultaneously across the city

The 2026 programme (25th anniversary) will be announced at kolga.ge in the weeks before May 1, following the pattern of previous editions. The festival's organising committee has confirmed that the 25th anniversary edition will include "a dynamic program of local and international exhibitions, master classes, seminars, discussions."

Georgian exhibitions — the domestic photography scene that KOLGA has done most to develop is consistently represented in the festival programme: emerging Georgian photographers alongside established figures, creating a dialogue between Georgian practice and the international work shown alongside it.

Award winner exhibitions — the winning and shortlisted work from the KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Award 2026 is exhibited during the festival in curated shows that present the best work selected from the global submissions.

The Opening Night: May 1 at TES

The festival opens on the evening of May 1, 2026 with the annual opening ceremony — the most concentrated event in the KOLGA calendar and the moment at which the photography community, cultural institutions, and the broader Tbilisi arts world come together to mark the beginning of another edition.

Based on the festival's established pattern (the 2024 opening ceremony was held at TES, Dodo Abashidze Street #10), the opening venue is an artistic and cultural space whose atmosphere matches the event's creative ambitions rather than a formal institutional auditorium.

The May 1 opening programme includes:

• KOLGA Award 2026 ceremony — the announcement of winners in all five competition categories; the prize fund of $6,000 is awarded; photographers, curators, jury members, and the assembled photography community hear the results simultaneously
• Opening exhibitions — the first exhibitions of the festival open on May 1, with the award winners' work among the first to be installed and viewable
• Music — the opening ceremony includes live music; the 2024 edition was hosted musically by Tape Visitors, suggesting the festival's commitment to a full cultural atmosphere rather than a purely formal prize-giving

The Masterclass and Educational Programme

The educational programme that runs alongside the exhibitions is one of the most significant elements of KOLGA Tbilisi Photo's contribution to Georgian visual culture.

Past festivals have included masterclasses by internationally recognised photographers and curators covering:

• Documentary photography practice and ethics
• Contemporary photojournalism and the changing media landscape
• Portfolio review and professional development for emerging photographers
• Conceptual photography approaches
• Photobook production and sequencing

The masterclasses are typically open to both professional photographers and serious students of the medium — one of the ways in which KOLGA has consistently fulfilled its founding mission of developing Georgian photography by bringing international expertise directly to Georgian practitioners.

Seminars and discussions on contemporary photography, the relationship between photography and social change, and the specific challenges facing photographers working in the Caucasus and post-Soviet space form a parallel programme that gives the festival intellectual weight beyond the purely visual.

KOLGA in Tbilisi's Cultural Geography

The geography of KOLGA Tbilisi Photo is inseparable from the city's own character — and the neighbourhoods whose venues host the festival's exhibitions give a visitor following the full programme a genuine tour of Tbilisi's contemporary creative geography.

Key Tbilisi areas in the KOLGA orbit:

Vera neighbourhood — one of Tbilisi's most historically residential and currently most gentrifying areas; galleries and cultural spaces in this tree-lined district have regularly hosted KOLGA exhibitions; the neighbourhood's early 20th-century apartment blocks provide distinctive architectural settings for contemporary photography

Sololaki — the historic Old Town district below the Mtatsminda hillside; the most architecturally preserved neighbourhood in Tbilisi, with 19th-century balconied wooden houses, internal courtyard architecture, and the specific atmosphere of a neighbourhood that feels simultaneously antique and alive; the neighbourhood that gave Tbilisi its most reproduced visual identity

Fabrika (Chugureti) — the former Soviet sewing factory converted into Tbilisi's most vibrant creative complex; its central courtyard, surrounding container-structure studios, and various event spaces have made it a natural KOLGA venue in recent editions

Rustaveli Avenue area — the National Gallery of Georgia (at Rustaveli #11), the Rustaveli Theatre, and the surrounding cultural institutions form a zone of established cultural infrastructure within which KOLGA exhibitions sit naturally alongside permanent collections

TES (Dodo Abashidze Street #10) — the current opening night venue; a multi-purpose cultural space that hosts some of Tbilisi's most significant contemporary arts events throughout the year

Practical Information for May 1–4, 2026

Festival dates: Friday, May 1 – Monday, May 4, 2026

Edition: 25th anniversary

Opening ceremony: May 1, 2026 (evening; exact time announced at kolga.ge)

Venues: Multiple artistic venues across Tbilisi — full list published at kolga.ge before the festival opens

Entry: Free for all public exhibitions

Award prize fund: $6,000 USD

Organizer: Foto Klub Objektiv

Presenting partner: TBC Bank

Official website: kolga.ge

Instagram/social: @KolgaTbilisiPhoto

Getting to Tbilisi:

• By air: Tbilisi International Airport (TBS) — direct flights from Amsterdam (~4 hours, KLM), Frankfurt (~3.5 hours), Vienna (~3 hours), Istanbul (~2 hours), Dubai (~2.5 hours), Tel Aviv (~3 hours), and across Europe and the Middle East
• Airport to city centre: Metro Line 2 to Rustaveli Station (~20 minutes); taxi/Bolt GEL 25–35 (~€9–13)

Getting between venues:

The city-wide format of KOLGA means that public transport, taxi (Bolt), and walking all serve different legs of the exhibition route:

• Metro Line 1 and 2 connect the major cultural hubs (Rustaveli, Liberty Square, Isani)
• Bolt (taxi app) — the most flexible option for moving between venues across different neighbourhoods; GEL 5–10 per trip within central Tbilisi (~€1.80–3.60)
• On foot — the Sololaki, Vera, and Rustaveli areas are all walkable from each other in 15–25 minutes; the best way to discover the city as you follow the exhibition trail

Weather in Tbilisi in early May:

Early May in Tbilisi brings 18–24°C temperatures, long afternoon light, and the spring energy of a city that has fully emerged from winter — conditions that make an outdoor, city-wide exhibition experience genuinely pleasant.

Twenty-Five Editions. One City. No Walls.

At KOLGA Tbilisi Photo 2026, the 25th edition of a festival that began in a city rebuilding its cultural life after independence and has grown into one of the Caucasus' most internationally connected arts events, Tbilisi opens itself as an exhibition space for four days in May.

Free entry. Multiple venues. Award announcements on opening night. The best contemporary photography in Georgia, all May 1–4. Follow the full programme at kolga.ge.

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