Ana Gzirishvili (1992 Tbilisi, Georgia) works in poetry, film, sculpture, and installation, examining the spaces – both physical and metaphorical - where objects and narratives come up against unfamiliar contexts. Her practice engages with themes of transition, circulation, and displacement, often through rearranging contexts and forms. For example, recent sculptural objects, made from dis- and re-assembled artificial leather handbags, take on various guises, depending on how and where they are positioned – above a door jamb, in a window, tucked snug against the wall - within a domestic setting.

Gzirishvili is a DAAD scholar and graduate of New Media & Film Studies led by professor Hito Steyerl at Universität der Künste Berlin. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Kunstraum Lakeside, Austria and Pickle Bar Presents – with Slavs and Tatars, Netherlands, both in 2024. Selected this year for In Practice at The Sculpture Center, New York, Gzirishvili will present her first institutional solo exhibition in January 2026. A new group of site specific leather sculptures was developed while in residence at Launch Pad LaB.

Ana Gzirishvili : Text by Rafa Barber Cortell, Visiting Curator, Launch Pad LaB, Spring 2025

During my visit to Launch Pad LaB, I stepped into three very different studio environments, each shaped by a distinct artistic language, yet all quietly resonating with a shared attention to what is absent, intangible, or just out of reach. In the work of Florence Peake, Ana Gzirishvili, and ektor garcía, absence takes on a material presence — not as a void to be filled, but as something that leaves a mark, a trace. Whether through gestures of mourning, acts of transformation, or intimate forms of making, each artist finds ways to work with what cannot be fully grasped. Materials such as plaster, leather, and thread become vessels for memory — carriers of what’s missing, what’s felt, what resists being named.

When I visited Ana Gzirishvili’s studio, her work unfolded throughout the space as a constellation of hybrid forms and diverse materials, arranged in a delicate balance between what has been and what is yet to come. The presence of moulded objects, unstable structures and decontextualised materials suggested a temporality in flux – a kind of living archaeology. Absence became tangible: her works seemed to evoke what is no longer there. Yet unlike Florence’s practice, Ana’s work is not about dwelling on the materiality of that absence, but rather about an active impulse toward transformation — a desire to narrate while looking ahead.

Ana’s practice, as I see it, does not seek to revisit the past, but rather to rework it — treating it as just another material within a visual language directed towards the future. Familiar forms dissolve into abstraction; everyday materials acquire symbolic weight. It is within this space of tension that her work truly comes to life: a practice in perpetual transition, where meanings, materials and emotional resonances are continually deconstructed and reassembled.

Among the works that most captivated me was a series developed through a technique of wet leather moulding. This method, which paradoxically fixes absence through the imprint of a form, gives rise to still lifes that capture the ephemeral. Some pieces emerged from new shapes created in the studio; others were cast from objects collected during her time at Launch Pad LaB. These sculptural elements are presented alongside wooden logs that act both as support structures and as conceptual counterpoints, establishing a material and formal dialogue that extends into her plaster works. In these, the plaster and mould reveal latent presences, combined with fabric and cotton that add tension to the composition, contrasting with the dense, tactile relationship between leather and wood.

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Ana’s artistic practice is deeply shaped by experiences of transition, circulation and displacement. Her work can be understood as an assemblage in the broadest sense: not only of objects and materials, but also of temporalities, stories and emotional states. The circulation of these elements — gathered, transformed, and removed from their original context — generates a displacement that is both physical and symbolic, underpinning her way of inhabiting the world and making art.

During her residency at Launch Pad LaB, Ana also began work on a film that, though still in progress, offers a sensitive entry point into her universe. It features a kind of still life constructed from the same materials found in her sculptures, yet reanimated by the movement of the camera. The image becomes an emotional landscape, an ambiguous setting in which the viewer is invited to suspend the logic of objects and enter an almost dreamlike state. What might at first appear to be ruin comes back to life — not as a relic of the past, but as a tool for navigating the present and imagining possible futures.