I mostly work on second-hand biazi — a cotton textile that was widely used in the Soviet Union for stretch ceilings. These fabrics were silent witnesses to the lifestyle, discipline, and collective psychology of that era. Today, I find them in old houses — some I buy, some I carefully remove from the ceiling myself. I wash them by hand, peeling off the glue and paper, but the texture still holds the time within it. It doesn’t wash away.

I didn’t think of the political context at first. When I enrolled in art school in Zugdidi in 2004, with teacher Jansugh Churgulia, biazi was simply the only available solution — I was taught how to prime it with homemade emulsion so it could hold oil paint.

What started as necessity became a technique.

And later — a political voice.

Today, biazi is both a fragment of my childhood and an archival remnant of empire.