The Tbilisi-born artist Anna K.E.  with her work  REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation…  has been chosen to represent Georgia at the Venice Biennale, curated by Margot Norton, a curator at the New Museum in New York.

Titled REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation… (2019), the project brought together many of the major motifs in the artist’s practice and encompasses her work in video, sculpture, performance, drawing, and installation. K.E., who was trained as a classical ballet dancer, has an acute sense of how the body moves through space, and her fluid architectural environments suggest a choreography, leading viewers to weave in and around her installations. Her whimsical videos feature her own body as the protagonist, restricted, contorted, or isolated, often pointing toward an evolving interdependency between our corporeal and digital selves. Absurd yet poignant allegories for contemporary life, K.E.’s works invite us to consider unconventional vantage points, illuminating how seemingly incongruous notions can coexist.              

K.E.’s structure for the Georgian Pavilion was equal parts public stage, ascending and descending tribunal platform, communal fountain, and sculptural object of observation. Her rising plateaus constructed of steel framework and brightly colored powder-coated tiles were recalling a matrix of digital pixels at low resolution, transporting viewers into an environment that suggested a sleek synthetic model. As her title suggests, K.E. here created a mirror whereby transitional processes were inverted and a flat simulation is crafted into a vibrant multi-dimensional landscape.

Interspersed throughout the installation was a compendium of K.E.’s videos as well as steel faucet-like sculptures that were based on the original Georgian alphabet, Asomtavruli. Water circulated through the letters in a continuous stream, suggesting a purifying and unifying substance that transverses the structures’ binary poles—each a negative image of the other. The letters phonetically spell the English word “deranged,” which refers to something that has become disturbed, irrational, or unstable—a mistranslation or “alternative fact” that may unhinge commonplace connections between language, form, and perception.

As systems and institutions, we once thought to be bedrock-stable now reveal themselves to be mere facades, artificial and precariously balanced, or even on the verge of collapse, K.E.’s words reminded us of the fundamental idiosyncrasies we share, and which keep us human.

“REARMIRRORVIEW, Simulation is Simulation, is Simulation, is Simulation...”

Anna K.E.

The project was presented in Venice in collaboration with New York’s Simone Subal Gallery and Tbilisi based gallery Project ArtBeat. Supported and commissioned by Ana Riaboshenko, Creative Georgia.  

Anna K.E. on her presentation for the 58th Venice Biennale, Artforum, Niji Nam, 2019