My trans-disciplinary art practice looks at culture as a primary catalyst for social change.
I create environments and immersive installations that, in pre-COVID times, morphed into extensive social sculptures where communal events such as dinners and dance parties occurred. In doing so, I question canonical truths, emphasizing identity-construction, representation, and archive. These installations are modular steel structures and serve as self-sustained display systems for paintings, tapestries, curtains, objects, and neons. As the pandemic made impossible communal, shared experiences, my focus has shifted to art-making as a form of knowledge production and sharing. I am committed to delinking from universalized (western) forms and norms of looking, interpreting, and representing the world. In the process of transitioning from a normative understanding of myself as a gay man with a Georgian upbringing, I embrace myself as a queer person from Eurasia while questioning my place and role in a globalized world.
Queerness, behavioral patterns, intersectionality, language, and ecology encompass my current frameworks. Through these lenses, I revisit the most intimate settings of my childhood—the rooms with heavily patterned wallpapers and tiles where my earliest traumas took place, and my consciousness was formed. As opposed to "illustration," I use "embodiment" as a primary creative strategy. I create "rooms" as psychological tableaus that can be experienced as two-dimensional images, environments, public sculptures, and VR installations. Personal and historical memory and trauma thus collapse into an experience through which the self may be healed and re-constituted.
Every new step in my practice starts with exploring non-artistic materials and techniques that, to my understanding, most precisely embody concerns I'm interested in. Throughout the past five years, I have addressed the idea of fluidity and the impossibility of capturing the now by experimenting with industrial paint (liquid mirror) as means of transforming images into reflective surfaces. Currently, my conceptual focus is on microbiological and psychological foundations of the human mind, the modular nature of our behavioral patterns, and all living organisms' interconnectivity. To address these topics, I have begun to explore natural latex, which is widely used for clinical and erotic- purposes, and various metal paper sheets as foundations for imagery. Modular and repetitive, these images are inspired by the Georgian alphabet and my childhood floral patterns and are transferred through monotype and screen-printing.
