Tamara Kvesitadze Reimagines Medea at Palazzo Bragadin, Venice

Georgian artist Tamara Kvesitadze presents 'Medea. Fragments of Memory' at Palazzo Bragadin in Venice, running from May 9 to October 31. Curated by Eka Enukidze and Hervé Mikaeloff, the exhibition reinterprets the myth of Medea, stripping away the tragic infanticide narrative to frame her as a critical lens on contemporary displacement and cultural discontinuity. The show features Kvesitadze's signature kinetic sculptures, including 'Reptile,' a hybrid mechanical structure that crawls along floors and walls, and a sequence of isolated female feet in perpetual motion. A modular urban model at the entrance mechanically expands and contracts, evoking Venice's precarious state between preservation and oblivion. The soundscape by Soundwalk Collective (Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli) incorporates radio waves, vocal fragments, and field recordings from the Black Sea region, creating a destabilizing acoustic environment. Red and blue paper surfaces with material fractures further emphasize memory as an incessant movement between emergence and erasure. The exhibition positions Colchis—the mythical territory linked to Kvesitadze's Georgian roots—as a symbolic field of historical and geographical stratification, while Venice itself functions as a critical device, a fragile archive and liminal organism suspended between conservation and disappearance.