Thea Djordjadze

“To me, these were simple reactions to the present moment and to the space I was in.” [Thea Djordjadze interviewed by Aurélie Voltz. In: “Thea Djordjadze. Se souvenir et témoigner”, ed. Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole (MAMC) and Aurélie Voltz, Saint-Étienne 2022, p. 27.] This is how German-Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze describes her early performances with the artist group hobbypopMUSEUM, which she was a member of during her student years in Düsseldorf. This concise and eloquent phrase is equally true of the expansive sculptural practice for which she has since been known. Thea Djordjadze’s installations and sculptures are the result of a “stream of consciousness” way of working, bringing together her own as well as ideas and images from different (cultural, physical) spaces. Influences are metabolized so that only their essence is echoed in the formal language that shapes her objects and ensembles of objects. Given the open-endedness she allows her works by keeping them always in a conversational relationship with each other and with their surroundings and never expelling them once they are “finished,” their potential remains quasi-endless, their condition in flux. Hence, her works are not only the result, but moreover the beginning of a dialog – with possible sources, material contingencies, with spaces they evoke and the spaces they inhabit.
The three unique prints Sie er die 1, 2, and 3 for the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen reiterate Thea Djordjadze’s non-hierarchical use of her own works as material. Somewhat obscured but recognizable at a second glance, after the veil of a possible abstraction dissipates, are three views of older sculptures toppled on their sides. These images are not meant to document, but to invoke the past life of the works depicted and to suggest the beginning of a new one. Delicately hinting at their own materiality, the works linger at the threshold between representation and sculptural intention. They incorporate reflections of their immediate surroundings, in other words, of their surrounding space, as though they were constitutive to them. The layering of materialities and dimensions, real and photographic, suspends the common conditions of perception for a brief moment or as long as the viewer will play along. The result allows for an essential and seemingly simple non/artistic exercise in reframing and sharpening one’s own point of view.
– Mihaela Chiriac