When the positive part of a fastener engages in the negative, it makes a noise: snap open, snap shut. Things into the handbag, things out of the handbag. With snap fasteners, but also with buckles, rivets, carabiners, zippers, leather straps, and other connecting pieces, some of them decorated with ornaments, the materials in Ana Gzirishvili’s sculptures are joined together—sometimes amorphously, sometimes biomorphically, but always as strange foreign bodies. So “Snaps” was what she called her recent show. But the artificial leather, plastic, and metal of the handbags bought by the artist on the secondary market are not the only things that “snap” when the materials combine and form new art objects. As precisely arranged in the exhibition space, they snapped into place with the context of the exhibition itself, with Tbilisi and its informal markets, with Georgia as a country between Orthodoxy and globalization.
Even before visitors entered the exhibition space through the door of what was previously a bourgeois apartment, they were welcomed by Tranquil Soil, 2023, a structure of partially colored textiles. The sinuous piece clung to the entrance as if at home there, as if it had been watching over a portal to another dimension for a very long time, a time before mankind; flowers—former handbag ornaments—sprout from it like mushrooms, giving it an organic feel. Inside the exhibition, the two-part assemblage Freckled Wing, 2023, each of its pieces more than seven feet long, crept up along the edges of the shutters to the top of the window frame. Locale, 2023, roughly the same size, lay on the parquet floor between a corner and a doorframe, fit snugly against the white wall. In addition to these site-specific works, Gzirishvili showed individual objects made of experimentally joined bags of all sorts. “A handbag is a property, shelter, and territory,” the artist wrote in a text accompanying the show, explaining her feminist view of pocketbooks as bridging public and private, inside and outside—transitional spaces.
Also shown were four framed and three unframed watercolor paintings, all Untitled, 2022–23, and eight tiny white plastic 3D prints. While the watercolors emphasize the organic aspects of the handbags, with colors mixing on the paper to create images between abstraction and figuration, the plastic objects—with titles such as Hiss, Crackle, or Flap, all 2023—reproduce elements that thematize and visualize moments of transition: a hinge, a clasp, or an eyelet.
Gzirishvili—who, together with Salome Dumbadze and Nina Kintsurashvili, is also active in the collective Tales of Loss—is part of a generation of young Georgians who want to connect their country to a global discourse without losing sight of their Caucasian heritage. Her artworks also reflect the transformations that Georgia and its conservative society are currently undergoing. The handbag not only is mere material for the artist, but also becomes a symbol for a country that is home to both twelfth-century Orthodox monasteries and queer techno parties. From within this state of suspension, this limbo, Gzirishvili’s works make a sound that is clearly perceptible beyond the borders of Georgia, reminding us of the satisfying sound when a fastener closes: snap!
— Franz Thalmair