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Who is it? Long before becoming a designer, Galib Gassanoff was fascinated by the cultures, languages and traditions that shaped the world around him. Born in Georgia and raised in an Azerbaijani community, Gassanoff grew up in a place where customs, preserved for centuries, shaped his daily life. This early curiosity underpins Institution, the project he founded in 2024. “I was always interested in ethnography and cultural research,” he recalls. Those early experiences, he says, informed the way he sees culture, as something shaped through exchange and movement, but also preservation. 

As a teenager, Gassanoff travelled frequently to Tbilisi, moving between the traditions of his hometown and the cosmopolitan energy of the capital. “It felt like travelling from one country to another,” he says. “The Caucasus is a multi-ethnic geographic area, where you are in touch with lots of different ethnic groups and their practices, crafts and languages. And when you learn a language, you instantly understand the way another ethnic group thinks.” The instinct to observe, research and understand before creating has remained central to his practice.