Changing room
21 jan - 12 feb 2023
The Why Not gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia
https://www.thewhynotgallery.com/changingroom
The Why Not gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia
https://www.thewhynotgallery.com/changingroom

“Changing room” is inspired by the artist’s recent body of research focusing on the queer cruising cultures in Azerbaijan and Georgia. Loosely titled ‘May my hand touch a man’ covers historical perspectives and includes contemporary cultural take on. The combination of digital hook-up apps, urban strata, and the commodification of LGBTQ+ cultures means that traditional cruising grounds are continually changing their structures. Geospatial technologies have generated a psycho-sexual geography that spreads across digitally-connected homes and profiles.
The exhibition imagines an environment of the private clubs as the producers of non-hetero architecture, where participants change physical and psychological factors to reenact their desired characters in dark spaces. Through a series of newly produced paintings, the artist inspects the patriarchal nature of the built environment. Cruising is at once perceived as a resistance, an avant-garde, and a vernacular, with an active relevance to and beyond LGBTQ+ circles.
Installation view_1-5
Pretty boy from Caucasus (selfportrait) I. Acrylics and mixed media on canvas. 90x85cm. 2023


