vgral
Experimental · Digital Art · Performance Art
Experimental · Digital Art · Performance Art
About the Artist
vgral is an emerging artist working across performance, digital art, and experimental practices. He currently lives, works, and creates in Tbilisi, Georgia.
His work begins with a simple premise: presence is never neutral. It is constructed, observed, and continuously destabilized.
With a background in computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as filmmaking and performative practices, drawing on butoh-informed approaches to the body, his practice unfolds at the intersection of technology and artistic expression, where systems and bodies confront one another. He integrates AI as a creative instrument, not as a tool of control but as a medium through which perception, identity, and authorship begin to shift.
His work investigates presence as a dynamic system, where gesture, tension, and perception do not express emotion but produce it. What appears as inner experience emerges through structures of observation, repetition, and duration.
His works often unfold at the fragile boundary between the observer and the observed, where the act of watching becomes unstable and recursive. The viewer is no longer external, but implicated, drawn into systems in which seeing and being seen collapse into one another.
Movement, stillness, and duration are not aesthetic choices but conditions, exposing how presence is constructed, sustained, and ultimately unsettled.
Recent Works
Video Art
Watch Them Watch is a video work about observation, absence, and the unstable mechanics of attention. Centered on a group of elderly viewers watching something outside the frame, the piece turns the act of looking itself into the subject of the image.
Background
Short Film
Indulgence for Sins
Winner
Best Foreign Film
Indulgence for Sins is a dark allegorical journey through guilt, power, and the illusion of redemption. After a stroke places a powerful senator between life and death, he finds himself wandering through a shadowy labyrinth where the echoes of his past take form. As he confronts the spirits of those destroyed by his actions, the promise of salvation slowly transforms into a confrontation with conscience.
Blending metaphysical imagery with psychological tension, the film reflects on a simple question: can redemption ever be bought, or must it be faced?
Short Film
Friends by Love
Arthouse
Short Film
Friends by Love unfolds as an act of observation in which intimacy is displaced and re-enacted. What appears to be a film about others gradually reveals itself as a structure through which unspoken emotions take form.
Between looking and being looked at, distance becomes a condition for feeling. What cannot be said directly begins to emerge through repetition, substitution, and the quiet tension of watching.
Exhibitions
Endless Void — The Silicon Valley International Contemporary Art Exhibition
Silicon Valley, California, USA
March 26 – April 4, 2026
Watch Them Watch
A video art work about observation, absence, and the invisible boundaries of social attention. The camera focuses on a group of elderly viewers watching something outside the frame. The audience never sees what they are looking at — only their reactions: curiosity, embarrassment, and fascination.
By removing the visible object of attention, the work turns the act of watching itself into the subject of the image. The unseen becomes a conceptual void that the viewer instinctively fills with imagination and personal assumptions.
The piece reflects on a subtle social tension: older people are rarely represented within contemporary visual culture as subjects of desire or curiosity. Their presence on screen creates an emotional friction between societal expectations, aging, and the human need for experience and attention.
The work was filmed with real participants, whose faces were later transformed using AI-assisted image synthesis, creating a fragile boundary between documentary presence and constructed identity.