ANNA R. JAPARIDZE

ANNA R. JAPARIDZE

PIGOTT | BAFTA SCHOLAR 2019

Anna R. Japaridze is an artist and filmmaker of dual British-Georgian nationality. She graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018 with a B.A. in Fine Art. While her practice is grounded in documentary, performance, text and installation also play a role in the development of her thought. Anna’s degree show piece comprised of a multi-channel video installation, bringing two films — Avirbin Chamovirbine (2018) and K’edeli (2017) — into a shared exhibition space. Avirbin Chamovirbine was conceived as a looping documentary installation, and structured in a non-linear fashion; the film holds various entrances that bear no explicit relation to one another, beyond being set in one, unspecified country. The film is arranged like a song without a chorus. It is a series of glimpses and suggestions, drawn up from an indentured feeling of longing and inconsolability. The second film, K’edeli shifts between two oral narratives set in the village of Surami, Georgia: one, a legend of the local fortress, and the other a true, familial account of marital kidnap, as recounted by the filmmaker’s grandparents at the kitchen table. The screens placed these tales in equivalence, as they meditated on the way collective fictions propagate and reiterate through lived experience.

Anna is a candidate for the MFA in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University. She aspires to make films that soften the boundaries of subjectivity and selfhood.