thea djordjadze: to be in an upright position on the feet

Thea Djordjadze’s expansive installations are always developed on site and in direct response to the surrounding space. She begins by exploring the specific qualities of an exhibition space; her works subtly transform the viewer’s perception and possible interpretations of the given architectural situation. Her creative practice consists in the ongoing repurposing, reconfiguration, and reorganisation of existing or new objects. The characteristic feature of her art is the provisional arrangement—the temporary solution or preliminary formal choice—that will subsequently be discarded or replaced and already contains within itself the seed of a transition into something else. Indeed, in a sense, such temporariness itself becomes the work.

For her exhibition at the Secession, Djordjadze has relocated her studio to Vienna. Literally everything that was not nailed down was dismantled, removed from shelves, stacked in moving cartons, sheathed in bubble wrap, piled up on palettes, loaded onto the truck. A radical decision, since it leaves her studio in Berlin completely empty, at least for the time being. All the things the artists needs for her work—or even more basically, in her everyday life—are temporarily out of reach. But does not such an evacuation, the creation of a tabula rasa, also embrace the possibility of a liberation, a new (or regained) freedom?