TAMARA KVESITDAZE: Medea—Fragments of Memory

Rooted in both mythology and cultural memory, the exhibition draws from the figure of Medea, daughter of King Aeëtes of Colchis, an ancient kingdom associated with present-day Georgia. In Kvesitadze’s vision, Medea transcends narrative to become a condition: a state of exile, fragmentation, and emotional displacement that resonates across time and geography. Venice itself becomes a conceptual anchor for the project. The artist describes the city as “one of the most vulnerable incarnations of architectural memory: a city built on water, existing between preservation and disappearance.” This tension materializes in a central installation: a square model city composed of elementary plywood forms. Slowly rising and dissolving, the structure evokes the unstable nature of memory, appearing, vanishing, and reconfiguring in an endless cycle. Large suspended panels of red and blue paper flank the space, their surfaces marked by fissures, traces, and stratifications. These works function as visual sediments of time, what remains after erosion, history, and transformation. Within this layered environment, Medea emerges not as a figure, but as an echo: a presence carried across worlds, altered yet persistent.

At the threshold of the exhibition, the viewer encounters Reptile, a kinetic sculpture extending from floor to ceiling. An ancient, pre-civilizational form, the reptile becomes a metaphor for transformation and survival. Composed of fragmented female feet, the red Reptile suggests a body that resists wholeness-layered, incomplete, and in constant mutation. Red, here, signifies not only blood, but intensity, origin, and accumulated experience. Further into the space, Whirling Woman, a fiberglass kinetic sculpture, turns slowly in perpetual motion. Neither fixed nor resolved, the figure embodies the condition of exile-caught between past and future, belonging and estrangement. Like memory itself, it remains unstable, resisting a singular direction or identity.

In this immersive environment, Medea is reimagined as a living tension rather than a mythological character. Her journey, marked by love, rupture, and displacement, becomes a reflection on the impossibility of continuity. She exists as trace, as residue, as something that persists even in fragmentation. Sound plays a crucial role in shaping this experience. Soundwalk Collective, founded by Stephan Crasneanscki and joined by Simone Merli, offers the sonic counterpart of the exhibition with their composition “Medea”. Drawing on recordings of radio waves, voices, and environmental sounds gathered around the Black Sea, the work unfolds as an immersive, fragmented, and deeply evocative acoustic journey. It mirrors the exhibition’s core themes: displacement, resonance, and the persistence of memory.

Medea—Fragments of Memory invites viewers into a sensory landscape where meaning is not explained but experienced. Moving through shifting forms, layered materials, and sonic atmospheres, the audience encounters memory as a living process, fluid, unstable, and profoundly human.