Sophia Tabatadze

links projects cv upcoming contacts
 
   
2002  
- Wallpaper  
- Self-Portrait as Architecture  
   
2003  
- De Doorzonwoning  
- House on Wheels  
   
2004  
- Architectural Drawings  
- Buildings and Strangebuildings  
- What We Thought Was a Wall   Turned Out to Be a Curtain  
- Tunnel  
   
2005  
- Heroes of Stagnation  
- Subu-Diet  
   
2006  
- Caucasian Memory Game  
- Georgian Toasting Traditions  
- Much More  
   
2007  
- Humancon Undercon  
   
2008  
- From Flags to Flowers  
- All my Re-Collections  
   
2009  
- Travelers Journal  
   
2010  
- Calendar and F Words  
- Just Buy and Put a Fence
Round it
 
   
2011  
- Gulo  
   
2012  
- Limitations of Imitation  
- Screens  
   
2012-14  
- Pirimze  
   
Title: Wallpaper
Year: 2002
Size: 50cm roll
Material: Factory printed wallpaper
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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 facade. 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.

 
 
 
Street installation, 2003, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
 
Street installation, detail, 2003, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
 
 
 
Installation view with wallpaper, 2007, Istanbul Biennale, Turkey
   
     
   
 
Rietveld Academy Graduation, 2002, Amsterdam, The Netherlands