metropolis m

Strange and familiar. A certain ambiguity marks the attempt of the Georgian-born, Berlin-based artist Thea Djordjadze to feel at home in an exhibition space. This spring she is presenting new work in Kiosk in Ghent. In 2009, Thea Djordjadze’s work was on view at the Kunsthalle Basel in a show (alluringly titled endless enclosure) that stuck in my mind in part – or first and foremost – because of the abundance of carpets adorning and covering the Kunsthalle’s magnificent upstairs exhibition space. This was not the first time that finely woven rugs – of a kind habitually referred to as ‘Persian’ or ‘Oriental’, even though they’re not always Persian, nor Oriental – had appeared in the work of Djordjadze, who was born in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in 1971, but here their presence appeared to acquire a truly programmatic dimension. This programmatic aspect was no longer merely limited to the obvious fact of their laborious, painstaking manual production – ‘craft’ being the all-too-lazily standardized frame of reference within which Djordjadze’s work is habitually read – but also concerned their cultural meaning in the various nomadic cultures of the Eurasian world, the residual conflation of ritual function and practical use. The nomad’s carpet does not only provide protection from wind, rain and cold; its unfurling also marks out the terrain of what, if only for a little while, will be called ‘home’. It is no coincidence, then, that so many oriental knotted pile carpets (to use the self-explanatory technical term) look like city maps or building plans, sometimes even like intricately laid-out pleasure gardens seen from above, or feature elaborate architectural motifs such as columns or (in Ottoman carpets in particular) prayer niches: they are meant to replace houses as much as lie in them. That we do not only live in buildings (‘homes’), rug-furnished or not, but also inside languages, is something we all know, but Djordjadze appears to be even more acutely aware of it than most of us – no small wonder, seeing as her world is criss-crossed by the linguistic fault lines of her native Georgian, her near-native Russian, her present-day German, and the art world’s global English (‘Globish’). Perhaps this is the reason why those artisans of pure language called poets often appear in her work, much in the same way as a prayer rug does in a religious household on Friday morning, or as an icon does in old-fashioned orthodox family home. For instance, a black-and-white photograph of the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (who later became an American – imagine the feat of winning the Nobel Prize for poetry written in a language that is not your own!) overlooking her installation Archäologie Politik (2008) in the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve. To be sure: wherever their portraits are so reverently held up, looking down on an art that diffidently lies below (Djordjadze likes to handle space horizontally), is somewhere I would like to call ‘home’.What else reminds us of home? What other markers of domesticity are at hand? Furniture, of course: a bed, chairs, sofas, a table – though this is something that evidently needs to be approached with great care: one of the weirdest exhibitions I have seen in recent times was The New Décor in the Hayward Gallery in London in 2010. Purporting to bring together the work of artists ‘whose work explores interior design as a means of engaging with changes in contemporary culture… dismantling the borders between interior decoration, sculpture and installation art,’ it really made every artwork in the show look like a naff, jokey piece of furniture – all the more tragic, really, as a stellar cast of artists (Djordjadze being one among them) had been assembled to prove the inane point of art’s supposed proximity to everyday life. Here, curation simply meant domestication, and unironically so, too: turning art’s enigmatic Unheimliche into its homely obverse.The chairs, shelves and tables in Djordjadze’s work are shadows of themselves rather than the real thing of course (and here I should perhaps admit that I included Djordjadze’s work in an exhibition I curated titled The Thing [part of All That is Solid Melts into Air, Mechelen, 2009 – ed.]), spectral markers of the absence of something like a ‘home’, perhaps even of the ultimate impossibility of something like a ‘home’. Figures of das Unheimliche, then, rather than of das Heim (‘home’ in German): that which Sigmund Freud, in a famous essay published in 1919, associated with the confusion arising from something dead appearing inexplicably alive, or something alive appearing inexplicably dead. The uncanny (as the feeling of das Unheimliche became known) as a site of atavistic fear: we all know how terribly frightening our own homes can be, indeed how much more scary and alive with death than the so-called unknown. Speaking of things, and speaking of the uncanny, and speaking of both in such a way as to lead us back, almost too effortlessly, to Thea Djordjadze’s love of carpets: how telling it is that the disembodied hand in The Addams Family, half butler, half family member, is called ‘Thing’! A disembodied hand racing around a castle that never seems to see the light of day is a spooky thing to be sure, a classic example of the Freudian uncanny – or is our fear of the ‘Thing’ merely a clumsy expression of the extent to which our digital selves have become alienated from our formerly manual selves? Weren’t our hands that part of the body that, before the advent of the machines, was put in charge of giving shape to the world, if possible even in our own image? It is easy to see where the art world’s current infatuation with artisanal (‘manual’) modes of production and old-fashion craftsmanship comes from: carpets, ceramics, weaving and woodcarving all help us to remind ourselves of the irreducible materiality of the world (our ‘home’) at an exact time when nothing seems more pressing, from an economic point of view, than its dematerialization. Here is where the hands of Thea Djordjadze come in: reclaiming, rematerializing.Dieter Roelstraete, based in Berlin, is curator at M HKA (Antwerp) and editor of AfterallThea Djordjadze: Quiet Speech in Wide CirculationKiosk, Ghent 5 February – 13 March