The theme of this factory-printed wallpaper, that of turning the inside out, involved comparing what was inside with what was outside of me. At that point in my life I was living in the Netherlands, finishing my studies, and checking myself against my surroundings in order to ‘fit in’ with them. When I tried to explain my work back then, I said that I was looking inside myself to see what was going on in there. What I found was in fact the same as what was going on around me.

This work reminded me of the houses I had  known as child in which everything was wallpapered - including the doors and  water pipes - and the feeling I had got that there was something hidden behind  this “respectable” façade. It seemed then that a slight change could turn everything upside down – which indeed is what happened, both to the Soviet Union and to the wallpapered houses in it.

I covered a half demolished building with this wallpaper. These buildings, with their exposed interior walls showing old  wallpaper patterns and tiles from the kitchen of somebody’s home, always gave  me the feeling of peeping into somebody else’s private life. By putting wallpaper patterned with internal organs on this kind of building, I question the border between inside and outside, private and public.