To construct a life story is to mythologise and reduce a complexity of facts into a refuge. Giorgi Shengelaia spent hours as a child gazing at the paintings of Georgian primitivist Niko Pirosmani in the homes of his parents’ friends. Pirosmani (1969) channels those memories. Aware that biography is a battleground of competing versions that obscures as much as it reveals, Antoinette Zwirchmayr returns radical ambiguity to her Austrian family’s colourful history in What I Remember (2017). (Carmen Gray)