Ana Gzirishvili: Central Market

Supported by the Tbilisi Public Art Fund, artist Ana Gzirishvili is working on the artistic text “Central Market”, set to be published by the end of 2025.

The text explores the sculptor's creative process and her bodily experiences in a fragmented material environment. These felt experiences are intertwined with memories, dreams, and language. The epicenter of this work is the railway station, the central market of Tbilisi. In the author's perception, this building becomes a fragmented body, placed in the midst of the socio-economic transactions of the city. The market is presented as a chaotic and heterogeneous public space.

The essence of the settled character of Georgia's urban landscape is captured and expressed by concepts such as changing realities - material (modern urban reality) and immaterial - fragmentation, disappearance, loss of memory, and discontinuity. The text consists of the artist's notes, concepts, poems, film sketches, descriptions, memories, and dreams. The text itself, which reflects the fragmented nature of the railway station market, is equally fragmented.

Born in 1992 in Tbilisi, Georgia, Ana Gzirishvili is a multimedia artist based in Tbilisi. A DAAD scholar, she studied in Professor Hito Steyerl’s New Media and Film Class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Her multidisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, film, CGI, poetry, and reading performances. Inspired by object-oriented ontology, she explores the liminal spaces and juncture points between beings, places, and objects, as well as between material and immaterial realms. Often, her works draw from the materiality and themes of the Bazar: transitionality, circulation, and displacement. Growing up amidst the ruins of the Soviet Union, and witnessing the calamities of the transitional period between two systems has influenced this perspective.

By disassembling and reassembling objects and contexts both physically and intangibly, Ana observes the entanglements, incongruences, and hybrid forms that emerge from these interactions. She creates installations using found objects and abstract cast sculptures, which are set in response to architectural morphologies or conveyed through a cinematic lens.The unfolding works evoke performative acts, past or present, leaving behind fragments and apparitions.