Thea Djordjadzes expansive installations are always developed on site and in direct response to the sur-rounding space. She begins by exploring the specific qualities of an exhibition space; her works subtly transform the viewers 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 arrangementthe temporary solution or preliminary formal choicethat 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 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 workor even more basically, in her everyday lifeare temporarily out of reach.
The complete inventory of Djordjadzes studio was the material out of which she has fashioned an instal-lation that turns her private workplace into a public scene and lends it a new order and sculptural form. Its transformation was based on a painstaking examination of the objects. In a time-consuming review, the artist studied their underlying nature and function, stripping them down before the minds eye to purely abstract materials available for an intuitive and pleasurable process of rearrangement: screws, electric appliances, tools, bags of plaster, papier-mâché, clay, a printer, a scanner, wood panels, square timber, shelves, archival boxes, paints, brushes, magazines, household goods, acrylic glass panes, steel racks, plants, tables, chairs, fabrics, furs, cushions, paintings, mouth-blown glass spheres, lamps, vitrines, models for future and objects from past exhibitions, etc.
Organising these materials and objects in a condensed presentation, the artist has created different zones that accentuate the exhibition space and its basic structure. Everything is aligned with a rigorous grid emphasising the tall ceilings and verticality in generalperhaps a laconic nod to Juddian design principles...