2019
Vocalisations | Sound | 5" | English | 16mm film, digitised
Vocalisations concerns the discovery of acoustic similarities between two forms of sound: the warble produced by foghorns as they guide ships to safety, and -- beneath the water -- a resonant hum that is produced by toadfish during mating season. These sounds have undulated through the Bay Area of California for generations, perforating both public and private space. Often experienced behind closed doors, at night, between dreams, they tend to exist in a liminal, rootless space that affords them a place in the ranks of rumour and quasi-mysticism.
The film is also about the visual similarities between fog and smoke, the signals that guide us, and the place of perceptual multiplicity -- of 'mistakingness' -- in light of the increasingly unequivocal presence of climate change.
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it slipped beneath the ocean too,
a language mirrored in the lowing of the fish
who would bathe there in summer
in the high season, finding partners there,
a mating call that would later be mistaken
by a wave of intercepted sleepers
for soviet activity, a sewage plant,
or a nuclear submarine
Untitled | Sound | 2" | Georgian
A personal amalgam of childhood domestic explorations is filmed on a mini DV cassette that
Produces a blatant artefact
The People who sit at the window seat have a duty to confirm that the world exists
The People... installation 2019
As far as anyone is concerned, they are as deaf, dumb, and as mute,
and as necessary, as icebergs.
This is for the iron balustrade and for the flashing wing. It is for the lift that nods recurrently; for endless acceptance, for a life of undecorated service. For a conveyor belt’s migrations, for the barrow and the long-necked crane, for all the silent workers, for conveyors without say.
Tirelessly, these things propel.
Pause with the spirits of utility. They are hard-heard and uneasy, like a draft beneath a door.
They belong to a world without mirrors, and deflect the gaze.
When their backs break, when they go to rest,
they take their final lodgings in the tide
— Just as one of a thousand things moving
gradually, without very much ceremony, from sight.
Like a whale-bone corset, like a world that never breathed.
Subdued beneath a fine veil of dust, the cabinet is a scene beyond its own appointment.
Perfectly still, the china lies unthought, delivered from carnality, and only monumental.
Only for the occasional glance does it perform:
a solemn play of light, an affected bow, a sequence of rehearsed images.
Formality reigns, setting a place for ideal forms that — having never arrived — are never considered gone.
This formality signs a contractual release for the hurried, irregular mass of living to go on.
The cabinet conserves the role of a drab paragon, called to testify upon the release of a tension for perfection.
2018
Avirbin Chamovirbine ავირბინ ჩამოვირბინე video installation | sound | 25" | Georgian and English
Avirbin Chamovirbine consists of a series of discrete, non-linear scenes that are set in an unspecified country. The film is arranged somewhat like a song without a chorus. It offers a series of glimpses and suggestions, drawn up from an indentured feeling of longing and inconsolability.
When I was 16, my grandfather Jemal began working on a sculpture of me. As I sat for him in his studio, I felt a desire to reciprocate with a portrait of my own. This catalysed a personal attempt to document him as he documented me in turn. Jemal has yet to finish this sculpture, and I have yet to complete a picture of him. We laboured over brief, discontinuous summers in Tbilisi as I came and went, grew up, and changed. The sculpture was always out of date.
Six years later I continued to trace the thread of this ongoing, circuitous attempt, interspersing it with various other narrative half-rhymes — a moth-eaten carpet, the loss of parent-child relations, a dialogue between sericulture and mortality.
2017
Scupture: Jemal Japaridze
K'edeli კედელი split-screen video installation | sound | 15" | Georgian and English
K’edeli shifts between two oral narratives set in the village of Surami, Georgia: one, a legend of the local fortress, and the other a true, familial account of marital kidnap, as recounted by my grandparents at the kitchen table. The screens place these tales in equivalence, as they meditate on the way collective fictions propagate through lived experience.
Exhibited at Treignac Projet, France, as part of Waiting to Speak, July 2018
Exhibited at Goldsmiths BAFA Degree Show, London, June 2018
Exhibited at Goldsmiths BAFA Degree Show, London, June 2018
2014
