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Over the past two years, a significant part of my practice has been dedicated to observing places at moments when they rapidly change their meaning, disappear, or fall apart. This process unfolds in parallel with the rise of right-wing power and the decreasing acceptance of marginalized groups in certain societies. This context shaped my thinking about space. Just a few months ago, when I was writing an earlier version of this text, I was focusing on queer-friendly spaces in Tbilisi, Georgia, and on how nightclubs functioned as safe spaces under authoritarian conditions, and how vital such spaces are, especially in times of oppression. Today, the clubs I was writing about no longer exist.

My first series of collages, Bathing after Duncan Grant, directly addresses the disappearance of spaces and, at the same time, the emergence of new ones or the reassignment of meaning to existing spaces. Duncan Grant's work The Bathing was created inside a public swimming pool in London in the early 20th century, at a time when homosexuality was punishable by law and it was impossible to be openly gay. I installed my work in the bathroom of a cheap hotel - a place often used for "forbidden meetings," such as hourly rented rooms. It felt as if no other space existed around you anymore, and these kinds of spaces began to create a sense of openness.

If, in Duncan Grant's time, swimming pools in London were gathering places for gay men where they could express their desires, what are the equivalent spaces for us today? Where can we seek shelter under pressure? These questions led me to the bathroom, and the introduction of sexual imagery into this private space made it feel increasingly claustrophobic.

From the very beginning of my work on the collages, I was thinking about lightboxes. The collages are transferred onto tape and created through the use of negative space, and the translucency of light passing through them was one of the main tools I was considering and trying to understand how to use properly. When I found advertising lightboxes, I initially had a clear idea of how I wanted to use them. However, once they entered my working space, the process shifted. The traditional elements of the lightbox—associated with advertising materials, political posters, and spectacles—transformed into a process of assembling, reworking, and reusing existing materials, and into an interaction between leftover visual codes from these systems.

The lightbox began to feel like a liminal space of its own, where sexual imagery infiltrates it, appropriates its elements, and produces a slightly absurd situation as a result of the interaction between these components.

The mosaic series is inspired by the visual characteristics of the Orthodox Church. Through the transfer of the collages onto tape, the images become faded, which led me to introduce traditional imagery from the Georgian Orthodox Church, combined with images found in the archives of the National Library. While adapting the collages for the lightboxes, I also began introducing text as material, primarily in Georgian. At the same time, I was thinking about how text could become unreadable or unperceivable—not only for those who cannot read Georgian, but also in a way that strips the text of its original meaning through a shift in context and through its connotations with archival imagery. Gradually, I began thinking about letters as symbols. This led me to introduce Nuskhuri script, an older version of the Georgian alphabet that today is used almost exclusively by the Georgian Orthodox Church.