Ausstellung Thea Djordjadze Text

         Thea Djordjadze (b. 1971 in Tbilisi) grew up in Soviet Georgia, which in the 1970s and ’80s was experiencing the downfall of a very strict regime. In 1978, Georgians had defended their right to have Georgian as the institutional first language, with Russian as the second language, which meant that everything was written in two languages. There were three television channels—one Georgian and two broadcasting from central Russia. 

Djordjadze was still a student of fine arts in 1991 when the country became one of the first to declare its independence from the Soviet Union, after which a civil war broke out that lasted for two years. She continued her training in Western Europe. After a stint at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she went to a newly reunified Germany. She studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Dieter Krieg and Rosemarie Trockel before moving to Berlin, where she has been based since the mid-2000s. 

Georgia, especially its capital Tbilisi, has never ceased being a very artistic, emotional, and beautiful place for the artist.[1]
 

            From what Thea Djordjadze perceived as a child in the Soviet Union, she came to realize that there were always two worlds that didn’t fit together: the official truth and the lived truth. Parallel to the political system, there was a social system that didn’t trust the propaganda and developed its own values, principles, and rules. There was no overt critique or confrontation, as it was abundantly clear that one couldn’t challenge the government like that. In her experience, there was only one option, and that was to create her own structures. These came about organically, as part of social life. 

Hence, she trusts that when movements emanate naturally from within a community, they can be super-strong, whether political or spatial.  »Maybe it can be summarized as: the reality of my life was initially composed of two frames. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and I built something up for myself here [in Germany], but I didn’t really believe in a stable system anymore. Since then, I’ve unconsciously been creating new frames with my work. But at the same time, I factor in their breakage—and often that of the objects, too.«[2]
 

            In her experimental practice, Thea Djordjadze proceeds by means of an informed intuition. Her sculptures, photographs, paintings, and environments emerge from her acute engagement with the active and latent energies of a space, using a broad range of materials in assemblages of singular poetry. 

Djordjadze’s artistic process-driven practice explores and responds to the specific place, sometimes reflectively, at other times as an immediate reaction to the given conditions. Often, images, forms, and ideas—from literature, design, painting, art history, and architecture, by and large, but not always, Modernist—flow into her work, leaving an imprint like an echo of the artist’s encounter with them.
 

            Thea Djordjadze has conceived and produced a new body of work for the Hamburger Kunsthalle, offering viewers a spatial, physical, and psychological experience and an awareness of how one moves through the whole space, »prompting people to look elsewhere than they would usually. Our habitual perspectives are extremely limited: we only perceive small sections of our environment.« In doing so, the artist challenges not only the formal and material qualities of the Hamburger Kunsthalle building’s first floor and atrium but also reveals their sensitive context, negative spaces, and sources of light which play on the works, walls, and floor, making architectonic and spatial conditions perceptible in an amplified way. She is primarily concerned with the tangible possibilities of space and material—more within the parameters of production than those of reception. But ultimately, it is the experience of objects in distinct locations that really distinguishes the outcome of her sculptural practice.
 

            As to the question of what happens when she arrives in the morning at the exhibition site of the Kunsthalle during installation, Djordjadze explains that she doesn’t arrive knowing what she wants; it is more a case of listening to the space. Having studied piano during her childhood— »I was scared to sleep in my bedroom because next to my bed was a huge black concert piano«[3]—she evokes the pianist Martha Argerich,  »who at 83 is still one of the world’s most astonishing pianists, with enough finger strength to shatter chestnuts or make a Steinway quiver«,[4] and Argerich’s intense memory of her first performance, at age eleven, of Schumann’s piano concerto at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires. The conductor Washington Castro told her never to forget that strange things happen to pianists who play that concerto. Schumann made her see  »new colours, new dimensions« in music that she has since played a multitude of times. Now, as her friends and colleagues have become ill or died, she confesses,  »I don’t know what I am doing, because I am still here. This feeling is quite recent, this feeling of not knowing.«[5] Argerich often speaks of her insecurity and doubts, and since the 1980s, she has eschewed solo performances, saying they make her feel lonely,  »like an insect under a beam of light.«[6]

As Djordjadze often states, it is not about technique but about reacting to what is happening around you and what one catches in a given moment in time, which always varies. Working in a space is less about what the work is than about how the people who are working with the artist react, how the light is, and what they are talking about, while never forgetting where she has started, even if that is always forgotten and ends up somewhere else. She chooses some sort of frame and tries to hold the things within these frames, and even though she imagines what it will be like, it never becomes what she imagines. It is a feeling of being open to what will happen without holding on to her thoughts or to any of her forms.[7]
 

            For the Kunsthalle’s show, Thea Djordjadze started with the production of two new metallic gates specially conceived for the space, which were the first pieces to be installed following the entirety of the black tiled floor being covered by a beige dance carpet. These act as her frames (brackets of sorts) and constraints similar to the French writer Raymond Roussel’s methods, who, as Nolan Kelly notes in a piece on Roussel’s stories, explained in a letter to his editor (published in How I Wrote Certain of My Books) that some of his »most rudimentary compositions began with the creation of two homophonic sentences as the first and last lines of a story; his task was then to get from A to B. [...] It is here that we are able to glimpse Roussel’s true mastery, his confidence over these self-imposed constraints, and his ability to take the most ridiculous boundaries and create a story that still succeeds on its own terms of believability. The mind becomes remarkably nimble when given a few confines to work with, and Roussel, ever mathematical in his writing, dissembles into parentheticals as his problems grow in size.«[8] 

It is like having an enclosure of sorts, and for Djordjadze, one piece from among all the others sometimes takes this role. She knows that she has something, and she can build around it. She never sees an exhibition as a singular thing but always considers it as part of what was before and what comes after. The process begins when she cleans her basement studio.[9] The process involves the transformation of one exhibition into another, a proceeding she refers to as sculpting one work into time, with every exhibition becoming a form of research into the past.[10]
 

            The artist made additional objects such as wooden or transparent boxes for the exhibition at the Kunsthalle. Her idea was to paint them; they would be blue boxes, but when she put them in the space, when the light hit them, she realized that she had to use them as sort of pedestals. That was a kind of surprise. Or she would have another idea; she wanted to install moving »curtains« without knowing if it would work—sculptures on railings. She is often anxious when making decisions, but there are always some answers as to why, and occasionally these turn up in the next exhibition; she uses old parts as additions to do something new. Even in travelling exhibitions, she would cut one piece from the precedent exhibition. The result is unstable. It is fragile even when she uses solid material.[11]
 

            Thea Djordjadze constructs a model of the exhibition space but doesn’t use it apart from as a point of reference not to forget, to see the space, and to understand what is given to her. The artist is involved with the exhibition as a medium, a landscape where everything is in flux and being stirred by an artistic language that slowly deploys its beauty.

The systematic incompleteness of her sculptures isn’t based solely on the temporariness of their realization in the space. They’re also designed to dissolve in one way or another. So, they run counter to the intention of all those monuments that are meant to last forever. She always considers the sculpture’s potential as vacant space or void; even when no longer there, it can continue its effects in the form of a negative presence.[12]
 

            Djordjadze’s pieces are indeed unstable; sometimes they can jump out, fall, or break until the right point of tension is found. The tent may look stable, but it is a shelter that can unexpectedly fall on one’s head. This is a thought that she finds herself revisiting through the lens of world situations.[13] 

It’s a process; just as one cannot always be cheerful, one must accept failure and then do something about it. One learns to overcome such circumstances, to deal with failing. It is not necessary for each exhibition to be the outstanding exhibition. Djordjadze is not thinking in these terms—an exhibition is like a portrait, a kind of translation, of the artist’s state of being in that moment. She invests her energy in doing it better, but it is always how strong or weak she is at that moment in her life that she is in. It is not a product; it is ephemeral and related to the Geist, the soul.[14] 
 

            Sometimes an exhibition perceived as  »failed« is ahead of its time; its full reception is delayed for the duration of sedimentation, and then its effects come back later in a form that one could not have predicted. It’s about trusting that artistic practice makes room for experiments that are not to be anticipated if one is to be hospitable to what has not been thought and experienced and which constitutes the very moment of the artistic practice. 

There is also the power of display—the amplification of the reception of ideas and gestures— in relation to constantly evolving acts and forms seeking emancipation from the dominant narratives, while also considering the close “critical intimacy” between the artwork and the viewer.
 

            A work by Thea Djordjadze can have different titles, or various pieces can have identical titles. When words or titles come to the artist, she writes them down as sentences or poems but does not link them to specific works. The titles, which are never descriptive, are treated “like sculptures: language as material that has to be formed and shaped”.[15] She has read a lot of poetry since her childhood, which has played a central role in her artistic practice: the poetry of T. S. Eliot (some of his lines appear as titles with the words out of order) or works by Russian poets Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Ossip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Nikolaï Goumilev; the Georgian poets Titsian Tabidze and Vazha-Pshavela; Polish poet Tadeusz Borozski; and particularly the poetry of Ann Carlson, among others.

Djordjadze keeps a list of her titles, on which she reflects over time. When a title is coloured green, it means she has used it. Her choices express her spontaneous reactions to the space. But to get this reactivity, everything must rest: every sentence and decision must be approached again, as if never seen before, or looked at from another side. 
 

            During the installation process, should something be compromised because things are moving too fast or the artist is fatigued, it becomes unbearable to remember. Her exhibitions are intentionally anachronistic; past configurations and insights surface, enchanting the present experiences and events. They involve organic remembrance and a discontinuous conception of historical time, made of full and empty moments. 

Her practice of thought and built constellations recalls what Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay,  »Theses on the Philosophy of History«:  »Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.« [16]

For Thea Djordjadze, art is more a reaction to the absurdity—politically, from all directions, one is driven to do art. Artists are part of everything, of course, including the market, but they try to do something from nothing every day, conscious of this absurdity.[17]

Footnotes

[1]See Study Magazine, vol. 6/03.24 – On Thea Djordjadze.

[2] See  »Building as Breaking«, Thea Djordjadze in Conversation with Anna Sinofzik, Texte zur Kunst: Sculpture, no. 134 (June 2024)

[3]  Study Magazine – On Thea Djordjadze.

[4] Javier C. Hernández,   »Martha Argerich, the Elusive, Enigmatic ‘Goddess’ of the Piano«, New York Times, 1 April 2025.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Based on a conversation between Thea Djordjadze and Corinne Diserens on the train between Berlin and Hamburg on 6 April 2025.

[8] Nolan Kelly,  »Raymond Roussel’s Stories Are Based on Complex Word Games«, Hyperallergic, 8 February 2020.

[9] Based on a conversation, Djordjadze and Diserens.

[10]Study Magazine – On Thea Djordjadze.

[11] Based on a conversation, Djordjadze and Diserens.

[12]  »Building as Breaking«

 Study Magazine – On Thea Djordjadze.

[14] Based on a conversation, Djordjadze and Diserens.

[15]  »Building as Breaking«

[16] Walter Benjamin,  »Theses on the Philosophy of History«, XVII, accessed 22 April 2025.

[17] Based on a conversation, Djordjadze and Diserens.