People often ask me — why do I paint on biazi?

Many have advised me to use “proper canvases” instead.

But biazi is not just a material for me — it is a carrier of memory.

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. 

The floral fabric I sometimes use recalls the old Soviet wallpapers I remember from childhood — though by then they were already faded, peeling, and torn. Once meant to create warmth and beauty inside homes, these decorative prints now symbolize something more fragile: the illusion of stability. In my paintings, these flowers appear like ghosts of comfort — soft, nostalgic, but ultimately false. They speak of a desire to cover up the cracks in both the walls and the system. The textile becomes a metaphor for how aesthetics were used to veil collapse. What was once home décor becomes an archive of disintegration. 

This striped textile is not just fabric — it becomes a structure in my work. At first glance, it might resemble domesticity, comfort, or a curtain from a shared past. But when I paint over it, it transforms: the stripes become architectural, like ghostly buildings rising through memory. It blurs the line between ornament and infrastructure, suggesting how the decorative often masks the structural violence beneath. Unlike biazi, this material isn’t from ceilings — but it still carries a symbolic presence. In my paintings, these stripes evoke institutional repetition, rigidity, and the sense of looming authority that persists from the Soviet experience.