ajh.pm is an art space opened in Bielefeld in December 2020. It showcases videos and other art projects by international artists at regular intervals. Videos are displayed in a loop at nightfall and can also be viewed for a limited time online.

Flowering and Fading, a 2024 short film by Andro Eradze running just over fifteen minutes, is cinema distilled into pure atmosphere, suspense, and escalation: an intensification, a steady build toward a climax that never arrives. Nothing happens here, and yet a great deal does. Or rather: nothing is there, and yet something is undeniably present. This is the classic setting of a horror film—transformed and flawlessly executed to evoke the uncanny in what remains unseen and is merely suggested. Stripped of nearly all narrative ballast, the film becomes a celebration of cinematic means in and for themselves.

Centered around a pivotal, hinge-like scene of an overturned jar of honey, the film unfolds a strange, elusive dream state. The boundaries between various actors—human and non-human, including animals but also the wind, the forest, the house and the honey, the leaves, the light, the creaking and gusting sounds, as well as all the other means of film—begin to dissolve and flow into a suspended, in-between space where it no longer matters whether things are resting on the ground or drifting through the air.
Through slow, “morphing” transformations, Eradze succeeds in animating the inanimate. After all, bringing the dead to life is not only the hallmark of the horror genre (the suspense logic of which Flowering and Fading pushes to a stylized, self-aware perfection); it also distinguishes the sublime illusion-machine that is cinema as a whole.
 

BIO:

Andro Eradze lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. His artworks and films have featured in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including the New Museum, New York, USA (2021); the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2022); the 22nd Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil; the 14th Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas, Lithuania (all in 2023); at SpazioA, Pistoia,; Artissima in Turin; the 9th Biennale Gherdëina, Val Gardena, all Italy; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (all in 2024); as well as at MoMA PS1, New York, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands (both in 2025). In 2023, he completed the residency program at WIELS in Brussels, Belgium.