Dormancy, 2026
Giorgi Kancheli

The Tbilisi Circus was completed in 1940 on a hill at the center of Tbilisi. Conceived as a public institution and urban landmark, the building remains suspended between presence and absence: continuously visible, yet increasingly withdrawn from everyday consciousness. Directly at the foot of the hill lies Heroes’ Square, home to a monument honoring those who died fighting Russian occupation. Sharing the same landscape, the circus and the war memorial anchor distinct forms of memory within the physical structures that surround them.

The film began as an attempt to reconstruct a childhood memory of the circus and evolved into an examination of the space as a machine for entertainment and control. Conceived as a state institution, it transformed spectacle into a mass civic ritual. Decades later, the building still operates inside the exact same structures—repeating the same gestures and performances from a different historical context. The spectator enters the arena, only to return to a city that functions in much the same way, constantly directing our attention while burying its histories just beneath the surface of forms.

Deep below the circus floor lies a sealed seed bunker. Built at the same time as the circus to preserve and study rare agricultural seeds, the bunker was later abandoned, flooded, and locked away for unknown reasons. The exhibition’s title, Dormancy, refers to this biological state—where a seed preserves itself without blooming, waiting for the right conditions to return. The film captures a similar state within a socio-historic context. It is not about what has vanished, but about what persists in this state of suspension, existing as a quiet trace of what remains buried below.