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After moving to Vienna, I began drawing sex scenes with shiny, colorful gel pens on transfer paper. The references came from mass-produced pornography. I then decided to return to collage. I cut the paper following the drawings, painted over it again with glittery pens, taped it, and washed the paper away. That was when I noticed something: drawing on tape with gel pen created a new layer between the tape and the paper, a kind of negative space.

Something about collage kept drawing me back. Perhaps it mirrors how I experience memory as fragmented, layered, and disjointed. It allows me to hold contradictions together without needing to resolve them. It feels like a queer form in itself, made of scraps, mistakes, and residue. I think my return to gay porn imagery was also connected to what was happening in Georgia. The so-called "Law on Family Values" banned any visibility or representation of queer topics. It has never been easy to be openly queer in Georgia, where one's life can literally be in danger, but this law changed the situation further. It felt as if all the spaces around me were disappearing, and those that remained became increasingly claustrophobic.

At the same time, I remembered Duncan Grant's piece Bathing from the early 20th century, depicting London's public swimming pools. In the fresco, athletic male bodies are jumping into the water, which at first glance appears unremarkable. However, the work was made at a time when homosexuality was criminalized, and swimming pools were among the few spaces where gay men could gather. This made me think about similar spaces for queer people in Georgia today. Where can we express ourselves, and where can we exist without being punished?

These questions, together with Grant's reference, led me to the space of the bathroom. At that time, I had just moved to Vienna, did not yet have a place to live, and was staying in a cheap hotel. The bathroom was barely two square meters. That was where I set up my first installation. I placed the collages in the bathroom and observed how they functioned in this space, paying attention to the contradictions that emerged between the intimate interior and the works themselves. The bathroom is always intimate. You are alone, naked, standing in front of the mirror. Into this space entered artworks made from images of mass-produced sex. The space seemed to shrink further and became heavier and more claustrophobic. This confrontation between privacy and exposure felt essential. Perhaps queerness is not only present in the imagery I use, but also in how I work—alone, with temporary materials, and in transitional spaces such as hotel rooms or bathrooms. These are spaces that are never fully private, yet never fully public.

This experience is not only about Georgia. Globally, right-wing powers are rising, and marginalized communities are increasingly being pushed out. In such moments, the loss of personal space, or the need to redefine it, becomes especially significant. Cheap hotels like these were, and in many places still are, used for temporary sexual encounters. Even today, in many countries, hourly rented apartments and budget hotels remain active sites for so-called "forbidden meetings."

I also asked myself what the equivalent of swimming pools might be for our generation. For me, it is nightclubs. Somehow, Tbilisi still has a rich nightlife, and the club scene remains queer-friendly.

In my collages, there is also a visual reference to lightboxes. At night, when we went clubbing, we had to pass through the Deserter's Bazaar, where lightboxes glowed with advertisements for printer services, coffee, and cigarettes. Mass-produced objects such as gay porn imagery, printed magazines, tape, and lightboxes come together to form something like a self-portrait of me within a capitalist world that constantly surrounds us.