Andropov’s Ears
HD video
Performance
Sculpture
2016-ongoing
Andropov’s Ears is an ongoing project by Medoidze that explores the abrupt disappearance of Brutalist architecture in Georgia, with a particular focus on a monument known as Andropov’s Ears, named after Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB. This modernist structure in Tbilisi was demolished by the neoliberal Georgian government and replaced with a symbol of capitalist prosperity: a shopping mall. In response, Medoidze, who is based in London, steps outside this cycle of loss by filming both the remnants of Brutalist architecture in London and her own sculpture of the vanished monument. A voiceover reading from a fictional story Medoidze wrote about a couple who, in a rare and unprecedented act in Soviet Georgia, occupy the Ears monument. By focusing on the fluidity between real and imagined references, Medoidze avoids a direct historical approach, instead presenting a meditation on memory, loss, and the reshaping of public space.