Sophio Medoidze: Bastard Sun

What Is the Use of Fire if It Does Not Warm?

Sophio Medoidze’s (b. Tbilisi, then USSR, 1978; lives and works in London) practice encompasses film, photography, writing, and sculpture and explores the poetic potential of uncertainty. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, the Serpentine Gallery, the Close Up Film Centre, Kunstmuseum Luzern, and the Whitechapel Gallery, amongst others. For a time she worked anonymously as part of the Clara Emigrand collective, disseminating her work outside the gallery context. Medoidze explores the relationship between rural and urban, languages and translations, as well as gender politics and dynamics. Her works often emerge from writing and unfold as installations incorporating moving image, sculpture, and text.

The publication Bastard Sun brings together a collection of photographs taken after the civil unrest in Georgia in the 1990s with short texts written over the subsequent visits to Georgia, together with a collection of twelve short stories. Medoidze’s writing provides nuanced and at times humorous reflections on personal and political change.

Bastard Sun is co-published with KONA BOOKS, a Tbilisi-based publishing house that focuses on contemporary visual and interdisciplinary projects.