Thea Djordjadze | Gaëlle Choisne | Simone Fattal

Tre progetti in mostra

Comunicato stampa

kaufmann repetto is pleased to announce Back Facing Front, Thea Djordjadze’s fourth solo show with the gallery, opening in Milan on November 20. The site-specific installation brings together newly conceived structures and reconfigured existing works. Interventions operated by the artist in-situ transform each element in a force with tendencies of its own, leaving it open to dissolve and then to be re-constituted in different, future activations.

For Djordjadze, the exhibition space solicits potential relationships between its architecture and the materials and forms that inhabit it for the duration of the show. Engaging with the symmetrical layout and minimalist features of the Milanese gallery, the artist conceived a wooden structure that runs along the perimeter walls, while wedge-shaped aluminum elements, originally devised for Djordjadze’s recent solo show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, are positioned along the window front. The rectilinear volumes of transparent cuboids hover on top of the concrete floor, and a bright red carpet on a slightly higher level sets off the more domestic territory of a small, adjacent chamber. The modularity of the sculptural interventions recalls the display devices encountered in museums, but their meanings and functions are undermined by unexpected associations and hybrid employments. Elements that at first sight seem to evoke a purely formal function as supporting structures for something else – shelves, pedestals, vitrines – reveal themselves as sculptures in their own right. Their clean, essential outlines and geometric shapes are countered by the highly subjective physicality of objects that transpire manual manipulation or bear the artist’s bodily intervention, like the scratched surface of a plaster wall relief, or the gestural traces on aluminum sheets, bent by the artist’s own body into sculptural forms. The rejection of permanent and stable meanings and functions is part of Djordjadze’s critical scrutiny of contemporary art making and its institutional reception, which she undermines by process-driven, provisional interventions that respond to the physicality of the specific spatial and temporal frame of an exhibition.

Thea Djordjadze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1971. She lives and works in Berlin. Her solo exhibitions include Hamburger Kunthalle (2025); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2024); Wiels, Brussels (2023); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Saint-Etienne Métropole (2022); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2021); Kunst Museum Winterhur (2019); Portikus (2018); Pinakothek der Moderne Staatliche (2018); La Triennale, Milano (2017); Secession, Vienna (2016); MoMA PS1, New York (2016); Mudam Musée d’art Moderne (2013); Aspen Art Museum (2013); Malmo Konsthall (2012); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2011); Kunsthalle Basel (2009); Kunsthalle Zurich (2008); Studio Voltaire, London (2007). Djordjadze participated in the Venice Biennale (2015); Venice Biennale, Georgian Pavilion (2013); Berlin Biennale (2008); Biennale de Lyon (2007). Among others, her work has been included in group exhibitions at MARCO, Rome (2024); Centre for Contemporary Arts, Berlin (2024); Migros Museum, Zurich (2024); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2023) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022).

Gaëlle Choisne

Exhale/Inhale
opening tomorrow thursday november 20th, 6-9pm
kaufmann repetto milan

Inhale/Exhale
through december 20th, 2025
kaufmann repetto new york

kaufmann repetto is pleased to present Gaëlle Choisne, Inhale/Exhale and Exhale/Inhale, two mirrored exhibitions opening at kaufmann repetto New York on November 7 and at kaufmann repetto Milan on November 20. Conceived as a diptych, the projects take the movement of breathing as structure and motif, moving between interiority and openness.

In New York, Inhale takes its cue from the words “I can’t breathe” not just as a slogan but as a measure of the air we share, evoking the physical, social, and political suffocation caused by police violence, notably the death of George Floyd in 2020. In a world that has become unbreathable for many, Inhale creates a place of respite and reconnection. In the words of the artist, “breathing has become a luxury, a spiritual wealth too often denied to those living under oppression or fear.” In Milan, Exhale carries this attention outward, proposing a meditative letting‑go that returns attention to the body and to others.

Born in France to a Haitian mother and Breton father, Gaëlle Choisne draws on Caribbean lineages, oral traditions, and Creole cosmologies, bringing them into conversation with contemporary social and environmental urgencies. Rooted in this Haitian ancestry and diasporic knowledge, Inhale/Exhale bridges cultures and temporalities, proposing breath as a shared practice of repair and a way of linking communities. Together, the exhibitions trace a single arc of purification, a modest rite for learning again to move through the world with awareness and reciprocity.

Choisne’s environments gather sculpture, image, scent, and found matter into charged constellations that oscillate between the domestic and the cosmic. At the core of Inhale in New York, a large Charm for Humanity folds lavender, coarse salt, and dried herbs into textiles, reactivating materials historically used for cleansing and protection, while a family of ceramic Boudoirs nearby offers small, contemplative zones for stillness and repair. Historically, boudoirs were spaces of gathering and exchange among women, sites of intimacy and resistance; here they serve as open sanctuaries for vulnerability, care, and reflection. Cigarettes appear occasionally like quiet provocations, a pointed note on toxicity and the illusion of release. A hand‑built brass mesh, Corps Éthérique, draws a visible yet passable line through the space, it runs through the room as a porous threshold: a filter for perspectives and energies, a line that conducts rather than divides.

Across both Milan and New York, new works from Safe Space for a Passing Historydevelop the artist’s collaged “scrap‑paintings,” where photographs, talismans, and textual fragments are layered onto reclaimed wooden panels, repurposed from the shipping crates of her earlier installations. These surfaces operate like moodboards for thought,sites where disparate histories and memories converge. Rather than illustrating a single narrative, they hold multiple temporalities at once – anti-colonial and abolitionist histories, Indigenous guardianship of knowledge, and popular culture as a communal balm – mapping networks of resilience and transformation. Profoundly influenced by the work of British author and critic Ekow Eshun and Pan-Africanist Nioussérê Kalala Omotunde, Gaëlle Choisne is also driven by a desire for reparation: “I connect with an energy, I channel messages from other worlds to create new temporal lines of healing and make our planet healthier.”

In Milan, the sequence centers on the diptych Safe Space for a Passing History – Ère du Verseau 999 (Long Story First), first presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2024 on the occasion of Choisne’s Marcel Duchamp Prize, where her installation explored astrological imaginaries as engines for rupture. The Boudoirs ceramics recur in both cities; the Milan iterations were developed during the artist’s 2025 residency at Scuola Piccola Zattere in Venice, where production was embedded in local craft networks. In the same context, Choisne collaborated with Venetian glassmakers on I hear my heart in your ear, a lamp inspired by the city’s iconic lampposts—folding neighborhood know-how, daily rhythms, and material vernacular directly into the exhibition’s meditative cadence.

If Inhale turns inward, Exhale releases that charge into motion, tracing the delicate continuum between tension and rest. The two chapters form an ecology of gestures—spatial, spiritual, and emotional—through which Choisne imagines her practice as a means of healing, connection, and balance. They honor the Yanomami and Indigenous peoples as guardians of land and breath, and they align with human and spiritual forces working toward freedom, peace, and repair. Across both sites, breathing itself becomes form: a disciplined pacing that involves care, attention, and reciprocity — an invitation to breathe with, and for, one another.

Gaëlle Choisne (b. 1985, Cherbourg, France) has exhibited at institutions including: Scuola Piccola Zattere, Venice (2025); Acacia Art Center, Paris (2023); Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, (2023); MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine (2022); Musée Henri Prades, in collaboration with MO.CO., Montpellier (2020); Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris (2020); The Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2019); and Bétonsalon, Paris (2018), among others. Her group shows include the 14th Taipei Biennial (2025); 15th Gwangju Biennale (2025); WIELS, Brussels (2025); 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (2024); Fondazione Zimei, Teatro Michetti, Pescara (2023); HKW, Berlin (2022); 5th New Museum Triennial, New York, USA (2021); GIBCA, Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2021); the 15th Biennale de Lyon (2019); the 14th Curitiba Biennial, Brazil (2019); the Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); the 12th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2015); and the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015). In 2024, She was the recipient of the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize.

courtyard project
Simone Fattal

opening tomorrow thursday november 20th, 6-9pm
kaufmann repetto milan