Tolia Astakhishvili builds a house inside the museum
Tolia Astakhishvili makes rooms that feel found rather than built: half-finished walls, excavated pipes, a bathtub, drawings pinned where no curator would pin them. For Figure of the Child, her first solo museum exhibition, mumok has given her the run of the space until 1 November 2026.
The title names an idea that recurs across her work. The child, in Astakhishvili's reading, holds two things at once: an unusual creative and intellectual freedom, and a complete dependence on other people. From that she takes an attitude toward looking — the "first encounter", the way something registers before you know what it is — and applies it to the museum itself, extending the experience of art into movement and touch and breaking the usual rules of presentation.
The installations are large. Singing out of doors (2026) runs to more than ten metres in each direction, made of construction material, woven polypropylene, aluminium foil, found objects and light. my emptiness (2025–26) uses excavated pipes, a bathtub, a shower tray and mirrors. Alongside them she has drawn in loans and works from the mumok collection: Vito Acconci, Karl Blossfeldt, Günter Brus, James Ensor, Nan Goldin, Louise Lawler, Charlotte Moorman & Nam June Paik, Pablo Picasso, Charlotte Posenenske, Medardo Rosso, Dieter Roth.
Astakhishvili was born in Tbilisi in 1974 and works between Tbilisi and Berlin. The exhibition, curated by Fatima Hellberg and Manuela Ammer, opens with the first of three artist's books, with texts by Kirsty Bell, Fatima Hellberg and Liesl Ujvary.
Tolia Astakhishvili. Figure of the Child runs from 20 June to 1 November 2026 at mumok, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna.
Photos: mumok, Vienna