Thea Djordjadze's installation at Wiels blends minimalist sculpture and photography in a restrained exhibition

Thea Djordjadze presents an installation at Wiels in Brussels, running from 7 October to 7 January. The Georgian-German artist fills several rooms with untitled works that collectively form a single cohesive piece. Her sculptures and photographs employ a muted palette of brown, grey, and white, emphasizing deliberate restraint. Djordjadze reinterprets minimalist forms as supports or plinths, such as a deep plywood shelf left mostly empty except for folded tarpaulin and bent steel sheets. A long white concrete bier and empty glass display cases on a plywood box add to the sparse arrangement. Photographs include an enigmatic brownish dome in a grey void and framed images with a silvery oxidized appearance, depicting geometric objects or antique urns without labels. One photograph shows a man in 70s sunglasses with a child, possibly the artist herself. Further sculptural elements include pastel plaster fragments under glass and white-painted wood pieces shaped like the letter pi on metal sheets with broken glass. The exhibition, titled 'the ceiling of a courtyard', unfolds in a parsimonious manner, using historical references and urban detritus to punctuate silence. Wiels occupies a 93-year-old former brewery building, with industrial features like copper vats in the atrium café, which influences Djordjadze's site-responsive practice intersecting twentieth-century abstraction and leftover materials.