Theatre of Memory / House 45

Lohuti Theatre, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 2026

House 45

House 45 takes as its starting point the geometric language of a Soviet-era mosaic from a residential building. Rather than reproducing the architectural image, Zulfiya Spowart translates its monumental forms into textile, embroidery and patchwork, shifting the work from the surface of architecture into a soft, tactile and bodily register. The rigid geometry of the mosaic becomes something that can fold, sag, overlap and extend into space. Architecture is no longer experienced only as a fixed structure surrounding the body, but as a form that can be carried, altered and encountered through it.

The labour of stitching and assembling the textile is part of this transformation. Familiar architectural forms are reconstructed through fragments of fabric, pattern and repetition, allowing the original image to persist while changing its material and spatial condition. Through this translation, House 45 considers how inherited forms survive when they move between architecture, material and the body — and how a structure can be transformed without losing the traces of what it once was.

Credits:

Curators: Catherine Chernova, Karolina Peskisheva