Changing Room
Watercolour on 200 gsm paper, triptych installation, variable dimensions, approximately 18 m²
2023
Changing Room explores queer cruising cultures in Azerbaijan and Georgia through painting and installation. Developed from Abdullayev’s research project O feet away, the exhibition considers how cruising spaces are continually reshaped by dating apps, urban transformation and the commercialisation of LGBTQ+ culture.
The exhibition imagines the private club as a form of non-heteronormative architecture: a dark, mutable environment in which bodies, identities and desires may be temporarily rearranged. Through a series of paintings, Abdullayev examines how the built environment reproduces patriarchal structures while also allowing alternative forms of intimacy and self-invention to emerge.
Here, cruising becomes both a spatial practice and a form of resistance—a coded way of inhabiting the city beyond its prescribed social order. Moving between physical meeting places and digitally connected profiles, Changing Room traces a shifting geography of desire, concealment and possibility.
Solo exhibition
The Why Not Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia
21 January–12 February 2023
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Watercolour on 200 gsm paper, triptych installation, variable dimensions, approximately 18 m²
2023
Changing Room explores queer cruising cultures in Azerbaijan and Georgia through painting and installation. Developed from Abdullayev’s research project O feet away, the exhibition considers how cruising spaces are continually reshaped by dating apps, urban transformation and the commercialisation of LGBTQ+ culture.
The exhibition imagines the private club as a form of non-heteronormative architecture: a dark, mutable environment in which bodies, identities and desires may be temporarily rearranged. Through a series of paintings, Abdullayev examines how the built environment reproduces patriarchal structures while also allowing alternative forms of intimacy and self-invention to emerge.
Here, cruising becomes both a spatial practice and a form of resistance—a coded way of inhabiting the city beyond its prescribed social order. Moving between physical meeting places and digitally connected profiles, Changing Room traces a shifting geography of desire, concealment and possibility.
Solo exhibition
The Why Not Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia
21 January–12 February 2023
