Sophio Medoidze screened a selection of her video work alongside Sergei Parajanov’s Kiyv Frescoes (1965-66). Following the screening Sophio Medoidze was joined by lecturer and film curator Maria Palacios Cruz, while artist and writer Frank Wasser read selected pieces from Medoidze’s short stories.
The Black Sea occupies a special place both of war and of pleasure in Medoidze’s videos and her short fiction selected for the event, exploring the spillages between the sacred and the profane realm.
With thanks to John O’Riordan and Peter Butler.
Sophio Medoidze is an artist and filmmaker. Medoidze was born in USSR, brought up in the Republic of Georgia and lives in London. She works with film, photography, text and sculpture and for a time she worked anonymously as part of the Clara Emigrand collective. Her work is marked by precarity and explores the poetic potential of uncertainty. She often acts in her own films, which progress by juxtaposing different image modalities and bashing sounds against one other, often to achieve a tragicomic effect. Her work is driven by the desire that is caught up between state violence and personal agency. Her work has been shown at Kunstmuseum Luzern, Whitechapel Gallery, Arnolfini and Silk Museum Tbilisi (upcoming). She is currently a recipient of a Tyneside cinema artist film commission and is working on her first feature film in Georgia.
Maria Palacios Cruz is a film curator based in London. She is currently deputy director at LUX, London, and was formerly the director of the Courtisane festival in Ghent (Belgium). She is also a programmer for the Punto de Vista festival in Pamplona (Spain) and course director for the Film Curating degree at the newly launched Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastian (Spain). She co-founded The Visible Press in 2014 and writes regularly on artists’ moving image, with recent texts on Laida Lertxundi, Manon de Boer, Jennifer West and Basma Alsharif.
Frank Wasser is an Irish artist, writer and art historian based in London working with performance, writing, exhibition-making and film. Wasser develops and performs private tours, workshops and lectures at Tate Modern and Tate Britain and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Wasser was recently selected as part of Jerwood Visual Arts Survey group show (October 2018). Other upcoming projects include a performance and commissioned work for Paperwork magazine (Vol. 3, September 2018) as well as his artist book, Zero Hour Fragments, which will be published by MA Bibliotheque (an imprint of Dr. Sharon Kivland) in September 2018. Frank Wasser is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.
