The Wind Will Rise

Parallel Vienna 2026 | Pavilion 7, Room 310 | Artist Statement

In the beginning, my collages were built entirely from found images—cutouts taken from second-hand books and vintage issues of National Geographic Georgia. I was fascinated by forcing contradictions together: a massive iron skyscraper "making out" with a coal mining area, or concrete utility poles having a strange romance with greenish water plants during a power shortage. My collages created crushing spots for these characters to exist—bringing them into a specific context where they belonged, yet had been erased from in reality.

Eventually, I turned the lens inward, replacing found printed matter with own photographs capturing the gentrification and shifting landscapes of Tbilisi. These images document the lingering shocks of the 1990s economy: cut-down grapevines, buildings frozen between privatization and abandonment, wheat fields turned into trailer parks, and synthetic drugs bought from a Bitcoin machine right next to a supermarket in front of a church.

From this archive, I began reconstructing spaces that operate as cruising spots, sites around the city, like the areas near the circus, occupied by trans sex workers, taxi drivers, and marginalized figures who have been systematically erased. Recreating these cruising spots is less about explicit depiction and much more about creating a sense of intimacy between the figures. It captures fleeting moments of connection and brings these characters back to the places they came from and truly belong.

Living in Central Europe, I deeply missed the specific graffiti on the walls back home. In Tbilisi, graffiti is encoded into the fabric of the city itself—a synthetic embroidery stamped onto the urban landscape to form an ephemeral, easily erased archive of protest. Light passes through floating images of excluded, blending dreamlike intimacy with the realities of the city to create a physical record for the future.

Parallel Vienna Listing

Euroremonti 2 (Detail), 2026Collage transfer on tape mounted in lightbox, ink on plastic sheet, 120 × 80 cm.

Euroremonti 1 & Euroremonti 2, 2026Collage transfer on tape mounted in lightbox, ink on plastic sheet, 120 × 165 cm.

Installation view, Euroremonti 1 and Euroremonti 2, 2026.

Installation view, collages mounted in lightbox.

Installation view Left: Strands, 2024, collage transfer on tape mounted in lightbox, 80 × 35 × 11 cm.Right: Motifs (Kuponi), 2026, mixed media collage, 18 × 24 cm.

being attached ,

anywhere, particullary nowhere

in between the ruins,

leftovers of pos industrial markets

burnt down in ashes,

In between the road cracks, where dert

carries smell of Ethylene glycol andlead.

and every night we meet.

and make out.

concrete blocks surrounds us,

and now we share the taste too,

of the lead,

the taste of all us.

Where is the guy,

you used to call ?

(account doesn’t exist)

±..

I had a dream. ,

Tsunami hit us,

the highways and it went over it,

I dissapeared,

got lost betwwen the transcripts,

stainles steel baricades,

and we still share the taste of lead,

maybe something new

Strands, 2024, Collage transfer on tape mounted in lightbox, 80 × 35 × 11 cm.

The Wind Will Rise, 2026,Installation view (lightbox detail), collage transfers on tape mounted in lightbox.

On Tom of Finland1. On Tom of Finland 2. (Detail of lightbox), 2025

Collage transfer on tape mounted in lightbox, 80 × 35 × 11 cm.

Untitled, 2024
Collage transfer on tape mounted in lightbox, 80 × 35 × 11 cm.