"Still photography is no passive record; it is an active site of meaning-making and cinematic memory, revealing Parajanov's mise-en-scène in fragmentary brilliance."
- Mariam Shergelashvili, art historian, 2025
Exploring the Archaeology of Being pairs two underground-floor presentations that expose, in different registers, the porous border between document and artwork.
The first gallery screens and anatomises Sergo Parajanov & Dodo Abashidze’s Legend of Surami Fortress (1984), a folk epic in which an entire citadel must be built around a sacrificial body. Shown alongside is a rare suite of on-set photographs preserved in a private collection. Far from standard set stills, these anonymous images isolate gestures, props and tableaux, mapping what Shergelashvili calls “Parajanov’s ritualistic directing style and the construction of cinematic myth.” They ask us to read each frame less as reportage than as a self-contained visual poem, echoing Ryan Gilbey’s judgment that the film is “one of Parajanov’s most powerful visual works.”
Across the corridor Fotoatelier presents two series by Tbilisi photographer Giorgi Shengelia—Accidental Portraits and Untitled Sheets. Shooting on both analogue and digital formats, Shengelia courts blur, double exposure and chemical drift. Faces merge with animal outlines; landscapes seem to inhale and exhale. “Accident,” he writes, is not flaw but a “philosophical category—an expression of time’s deformation and the unstable nature of memory.” Utensils, gestures and glances function like archaeological shards, clues to lives already eroding.
Together the two displays turn the basement into a stratified dig site. Parajanov’s legendary fortress collapses and rebuilds inside each photograph; Shengelia’s silver-halide veils store breath and doubt in equal measure. Both bodies of work replace narrative certainty with visual sediment, insisting that history is apprehended through fragments, echoes and after-images. By staging these dialogues Art Foundation Anagi extends its mandate to recuperate Georgian cultural memory—whether exiled on European festival screens or latent in a photographer’s contact sheets—and to present it as living matter for contemporary reflection.