June 20–November 1, 2026
Tolia Astakhishvili’s first solo museum exhibition sees the Tbilisi- and Berlin-based artist return to her layered accumulations of industrial materials such as drywall, plaster, tarpaulins, and architectural infrastructure. Assembled as permeable, sometimes human-sized dwellings, these structures contain a plurality of works, including collaborations, friends’ and her parents’ artworks, works from the mumok collection and found objects. These distinctive architectural constructions by Astakhishvili dissolve the spatial logics designed by museums around an artwork, placing a predicament into the relation between background and foreground, where a sightline or thought is continually displaced by another encounter. To read these vertiginous relations together, the installation becomes a critical study of the attended and overlooked, the discarded and the valueless—or, as Astakhishvili described to me, “how the institution loves some of its children more than others.”
Purposively located in the basement of the museum, Astakhishvili makes viscerally proximate the hidden architectural infrastructure that runs through the building; the first work encountered is Their own small gardens (2026); twenty Hantarex box-monitors strewn across the floor, each displays a tracking shot of the ground below the gallery—the ducting, piping, detritus. The hidden functioning of a building is evidently part of Astakhishvili’s drive to expose or make visible characteristics that are equally reflective of a nation-state’s identity and its socioeconomic wealth as they are simply satisfying objects to examine in detail. Somewhat tellingly, mumok’s undersides appear clean.
Arriving at a red-lit, open, subway-like space lined with tarpaulin, a portal that also becomes a wry, makeshift birthing canal, the visitor narratively moves outward into a larger, dimly lit space. At its centre, my emptiness (2025–26), a life-sized bathroom; its walls bisected so that the shower unit and plumbing is exposed like a diagrammatic drawing for a laborer. Forms resembling extractor units lie horizontally, filled with disheveled keepsakes, the worthless or abandoned; false columns emanate pinpricks of light; piles of white bedding are arrayed on the floor and scattered with drawings. In one corner several air ventilation units emit sounds—placing a head into the darkened void, the faint, ambiguous sounds of a lorry parked or objects being stacked can be heard. Further codes of domestic space are rendered into minimal forms, issuing a sense of something empty, forlorn, forgotten. In one video, from here to there (sidewalks) II (2026), placed high on a wall, masses of cabling spills out, again, rather than consolidate or stabilise forces that are sought in a habitat, we float rootless through an exposed wreckage of architecture in a series of digitally animated and filmed sequences.
The absence of bright illumination in the gallery is also instructive: it produces a slowness in our movements. Like somnambulists, we tread carefully, neither to disrupt nor fall into an object or structure. This tentative relation to the external world returns us to the condition of children grasping outward to the unknown, how we conceive, question, or follow. These notions are further bound by the numerous drawings, whether on sunlight-stained paper or doodled or graffitied in black pen onto walls and surfaces that litter the space—often small, scribbled, troubled faces, some breastfeeding, others drinking or swallowing, a face crying—descriptions that are scrubbed out and rephrased, as if the first attempt failed, each redraft a way to force a claim closer to the memory wanted. Amid such stark contexts, the inherent vulnerabilities, dependencies and unruliness of the child point us to questions such as: “Could I make a home here?” “What do I need to survive or sustain the life I’m in?” “What is the barest minimum I need?”
Prior to the opening of this exhibition, Astakhishvili enabled visitors to access the production of the show as part of her “Tolia Curriculum” program, which also included numerous talks and events. The density of processes and number of collaborations involved in the making of this exhibition is clearly driven by Astakhishvili’s conceptually porous approach, one expanded by her decision to include works from mumok’s contemporary collection. For instance, around one corner above a makeshift bed labeled in marker pen with the words “You can sit and rest” is a monitor showing Vito Acconci’s Combination (1971). A video documents the six-hour performance in an elevator shaft, in which the artist holds three roosters close to his body, releasing and squeezing them with awkward, disturbing zeal. Further interactions with the collection can be found in the “Huts” series, small open-faced wooden units—her collaborator James Richards aptly describes them as “Wendy houses”—that evoke places to hide or get lost in, play or remake, and which bring together works bridging folkloric and homespun artifacts with artworks by Ull Hohn, Heimo Zobernig, Charlotte Posenenske, and Dieter Roth, amongst others. There is a sense of encountering a series of exhibitions buried within other exhibitions. Often, we take on a sense of searching through a location, now abandoned, where each element eclipses or overlays another, as if numerous versions of the “Figure of the Child” appear in constant, even paradoxical tension with one another.
Projected onto a large freestanding structure, Wild Thing, made with Richards, is a video comprising a series of stills depicting the disinhibited behaviors of a puppy recorded on the surface of a flatbed scanner. Unlike the logical progressions of recorded movement found in Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of humans and animals shot in sequence against a grid, we see the dog’s unsteady movements jaggedly rendered, the horizontal trawl of the scanner unevenly capturing its pink paws, feces, but also doggie treats given to make it climb aboard. Its restless evasions redolent of the power trapped between humans and animals.
Here, the Freudian narrative of an unruly unconscious realm that divides the subject and places us at odds with our instincts and desires crystallizes, where the figure of the child is not simply a conceit for an exhibition: a construct briefly shown to be outside the acculturating forces that will ultimately ensnare it. Rather, the exhibition retains something more pungent, it reveals the scales of the costs imbedded in what is discarded, and the lives of those socially designed to be at its edges. Astakhishvili works a realist novelist might, witnessing and recording in continuous detail the life that runs past her. An expansiveness that ultimately animates the exhibition, one grounded in trying, once more, to make a home.
