Tolia Astakhishvili
Tolia Astakhishvili was born in 1974 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lives between Berlin and Tbilisi. Her work encompasses sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, video, and writing, integrated into architectural environments that evoke spaces in transformation. Recent solo exhibitions include SculptureCenter, New York (2024), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023), and the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2023). She has also exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York (2025), the Kunsthalle Zürich (2023), Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, and Malmö Konsthall (2019).
ᲡᲐᲔᲠᲗᲐᲨᲝᲠᲘᲡᲝ (INTERNATIONAL)
2024 (version 2025)
black metal (rebar), metal sheet of rebar, protective coating
Courtesy of the artist and LC Queisser gallery, Tbilisi, Cologne
Internationalism means solidarity that transcends ethnic and national divisions. In the work International, the artist performs a literal and metaphorical vivisection of this concept, dismantling its meanings. The word placed on the arch საერთაშორისო means “international.” Its first five letters (საერო) translate as “for the good of the country.” The second word, ველი, is a fragment of the word lying on the floor, გაურკ. Together these elements form გაურკვეველი, meaning “uncertain.” An additional letter, უ (“u”), lies separately next to the other letters, further emphasizing the theme of uncertainty. Created in 2024, the work is a commentary on the direction of political changes in Georgia, stretched between international integration and national isolationism.
Morning Rituals
2024
Paper, ink, plaster, plasterboard, plexiglass
65 × 41.2 × 6.5 cm
Courtesy Private Collection
Tolia Astakhishvili (b. 1974, Tbilisi) creates immersive works that blur the boundaries between architecture, sculpture, and painting, often using fragmented materials to evoke states of transition and instability. Morning Rituals unfolds as such a fragile, suspended fragment – part wall, part drawing, part body in flux. Composed of paper, ink, plaster, plasterboard, and plexiglass, the work appears both constructed and collapsing, as if caught between formation and disintegration. Surfaces bend, stretch, and tilt forward, evoking a bodily gesture: a posture of beginning but also of fatigue, of carrying weight.
Playing subtly between morning and mourning, the work evokes the quiet rituals of beginning again – small, almost imperceptible actions of repetition and renewal through which bodies and spaces reorient themselves. Yet within these gestures, traces linger: marks, residues, and fragments that hint at what has been carried over.
Tolia Astakhishvili’s practice treats architecture as an unstable, living structure – one that absorbs and releases meaning over time to explore themes of memory, displacement, and the shifting relationship between bodies and space. In Morning Rituals, this process feels intimate, as if the surface itself is thinking or remembering.
Tolia Astakhishvili participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Near East Far West (03.10.25–08.01.26) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.