Tolia Astakhishvili: Figure of the Child and Tolia Curriculum

Figure of the Child is Tolia Astakhishvili’s first solo museum exhibition and her largest presentation to date. Realized in situ, the exhibition profoundly transforms mumok’s spaces and procedures, seeking to bridge the rhythms of everyday life with the temporality of exhibition-making through a careful attunement to the threshold where they meet. In the process, Astakhishvili has been guided by a recurring motif in her work: the titular “figure of the child.” For the artist, this figure encompasses the remarkable intellectual and creative autonomy of children, but also their fundamental dependency and vulnerability. Beginning from this tension, the exhibition unfolds into a broader exploration of the possibilities and limits of empathy.

In the months leading up to the exhibition opening, Astakhishvili will develop the project on site at mumok and share her process with the public via Tolia Curriculum, a format that re-envisions the temporality of exhibition-making. Here, the artist intervenes in conventional museum logistics by inviting visitors into production and installation phases that are typically held out of view. In doing so, she shifts the focus to moments of transition and extends the process of transformation beyond its usual temporal limits and structures of visibility. Audiences are thus invited to encounter the work while it is still taking shape, marking a first in mumok’s history.

Amidst an evolving architectural environment, Tolia Curriculum unfolds as a living daily program of workshops, screenings, readings, and participatory formats for children and adults. These collective activities channel the artist’s ethos of inhabiting space and allowing the traces within to transform it over time. To this end, Tolia Astakhishvili has brought her close collaborators into the process, opening her practice of exchange and distributed authorship to the public. Contributors across practical and discursive formats include: Liesl Ujvary, writer of poetry, fiction and radio plays; Kristian Vistrup Madsen, writer, critic and curator; James Richards and Simon Lässig, artists and filmmakers; Livia Polanyi, linguist and writer; Dylan Peirce, artist and musician; and Laurids Ortner, architect of mumok and co-founder of Haus Rucker & Co. Further collaborations will take place with Astakhishvili’s past and present students, as well as with Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts and University of Applied Arts. What connects these contributors is a shared understanding of education as a collective practice. 

As a prelude to mumok’s forthcoming 2026 programming under director Fatima Hellberg, which will focus on the relationship between art and life, Tolia Curriculum transforms the museum into a place where artistic work can be experienced as an ongoing process. The format gradually folds into the exhibition, Figure of the Child, where the “figure of the child” is continuously incarnated anew throughout the installation, publication, and accompanying events.

This newness involves a radical potential as well as the friction of difference. A newborn enters the world fundamentally out of sync with its surroundings, compelled to observe, adapt, and at times surrender to preexisting structures. Figure of the Child offers an artistic analog of this process while foregrounding its emotional dynamics: moments of bewilderment and wonder, but also the fundamental need to survive. Through continuous processes of rupture and adaptation, Figure of the Child and Tolia Curriculum ultimately reimagine the museum itself as a vulnerable and shifting organism—one continually negotiating tensions between inheritance, adaptation, and the possibility of change.

With works by Zurab Astakhishvili, Aurel, Ştefan Bertalan, Kaucyila Brooke, Veronica Brovall, Günter Brus, Elene Chantladze, James Ensor, Nan Goldin, Yaryna Fedoriv, Irma Gubeladze, Ull Hohn, Paul Joostens, Alison Knowles, Louise Lawler, Charlotte Moorman & Nam June Paik, Dylan Peirce, Pablo Picasso, Charlotte Posenenske, James Richards, Irena Rosc, Medardo Rosso, Dieter Roth, Maka Sanadze, Heimo Zobernig, and others

Curated by Fatima Hellberg and Manuela Ammer 

Tolia Astakhishvili (born 1974 in Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Tbilisi and Berlin. In her interdisciplinary practice, Astakhishvili develops immersive installations that encompass elements of sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and video. Her work approaches architecture as an open material shaped by the bodies, memories, and the stories that inhabit it. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice (2025); SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023); and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2023). Recent group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, New York (2025); Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2025); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Roma, Rome (2024).

For more details on the program of Tolia Curriculum please visit www.mumok.at/en/curriculum.

For any press & media enquiries please contact presse@mumok.at.