Central Market (2)
TRAILER SOON!
Performance
Concept by Ana Gzirishvili & Magdalena Mitterhofer
Written by: Ana Gzirishvili
Directed by: Magdalena Mitterhofer
Performed by, developed together: Magdalena Mitterhofer & Arthur Chruszcz
Sound: Nelson Beer
Costume: Clever Disguises
Video footage of market: Giorgi Shanidze
Video documentation: Arnold Trautwein, Luca Oliveria de Sousa
Technical support: Mariano Rosales
Photo: Ellie Lizbeth Brown
Premiere: 20 September 2025, 19:00 at Pickle Bar (offsite location: Chapters Bookshop)
Performance as part of the SHE-WAILERS program, supported by Förderung durch die Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt des Landes Berlin.
Text by Ana Gzirishvili is supported by the Tbilisi Public Art Fund.
In “Central Market (2)”, artists Magdalena Mitterhofer and Ana Gzirishvili weave their site-specific practices into a performative installation, staging Central Market (1) - a text originally written by Gzirishvili.
At the heart of the work lies “Vagzali”, Tbilisi’s central market - imagined as a fractured body at the centre of the city’s economic and social exchanges.
The market presents itself as a chaotic, ambiguous public space, where shifting realities — urban and immaterial alike - intertwine with themes of fragmentation, disappearance, memory loss, and discontinuity, embodying the prevailing ethos of Georgia’s urban landscape.
The essence of the market, together with Ana Gzirishvili’s texts, collected film material, and sculpture, unfolds in a new context, re-situated and reinterpreted by Magdalena Mitterhofer within the space of a former butcher shop in the transforming district of Moabit, soon to become home to a bookshop.
The performance raises questions relevant to both Tbilisi and Berlin, such as urban planning, privatization, and gentrification, while pointing out loopholes, systemic ruptures, and the potential for alternative ways of inhabiting or interrupting the ever-changing urban landscape.
At its core lies a close observation of what remains - traces of use, wear, and transformation through labor and devotion. Beauty emerges along the edges, though always in fractured forms.
