Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Thea Djordjadze: Se souvenir et témoigner at MAMC+, Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, 5 February–15 May, 2022.The publication unveils materials, archives and writings from the artist in the first part, while the second combines exhibition views from the Gropius Bau in Berlin and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne to apprehend her sense of installation and composition in two opposite spaces. An interview with the artist by MAMC+ director Aurélie Voltz and an essay by the art historian Thomas Boutoux.

Thea Djordjadze mainly works with sculpture although she has also realized performances and been involved in music projects. In her sculptures, she often uses perishable, fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and may hint at femininity, such as plaster, ceramic, silicon, sponge, cardboard, textiles and soap. The shelves, railings, walls and boxes that support or encase the sculptural objects, are simple but delicate architectural structures of wood and metal. Their expression stands in stark contrast to the organic shapes and “unfinished” surfaces of modestly scaled sculptures propped against walls, resting on shelves or hanging from railings. These passive-aggressive configurations of conflicting but mutually dependent objects make cryptic and elliptical reference to the sculpture of classical modernism. The artist’s drawings and watercolours are often part of installations, doubling and heightening their expressive impact and also underlining the fragmentary, unfinished state of the work. They are neither preliminary sketches for future three-dimensional works nor are they studies of already existing sculptures or autonomous pieces. It is as if the sculptures were living bodies that have assumed a definitive shape and became motionless only for a moment—and the drawings have taken note of their temporary appearance.

With texts from Oksana Bulgakowa and Adam Szymczyk.