Tolia Astakhishvili

Emalin is pleased to present A Wound on My Plate, Tolia Astakhishvili’s (b. 1974, Tbilisi, GE) first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. Through a month-long engagement with The Clerk’s House, the artist has reshaped the gallery through architectural interventions, sculpture, painting, drawing, sound and moving image. The resulting exhibition comprises a body of new works alongside collaborations with Zurab Astakhishvili (1951 – 2025, Tbilisi, GE), Dylan Peirce (b. 1977, Paris, FR) and James Richards (b. 1983, Cardiff, UK).

Astakhishvili’s practice unfolds as a series of nested interiors, collaged worlds within worlds where multiple registers intersect. In this simultaneity, architecture becomes a structural material, responsive and unfixed, rewritten by the bodies and histories that move through it. Her interventions uncover hidden recesses and interstices, mapping the subtle remnants of use and care, while exposing the authority of existing structures and how they may be reorganised, concealed or sacrificed. Running through this process, Astakhishvili demonstrates an attentiveness to the human impulse to make - and to discard. Domestic debris and disavowed objects, clutter estranged from its former use, are gathered and sorted into strange new arrangements. In her hands, these objects, alongside raw construction material, drawings, writings, trompe-l’oeil painting, photographic imagery and sound, coalesce into stratified forms that seem inhabited by residual life, as though memory and desire have inscribed themselves into matter. Her exhibitions emerge as a kind of psychic architecture. Interiors, thickened by projection and interpretation; recursive spaces, swollen beyond their own perimeter until their dimensions feel unstable.

Tolia Astakhishvili lives and works in Tbilisi and Berlin. She graduated with a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Tbilisi in 1994 and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, in 1996. She completed the MFA at London’s Chelsea College of Art in 2001.

Recent solo exhibitions include Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice (2025); LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2025); Sculpture Center, New York (2024); Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023); Bonner Kunstverein (2023); and Bielefelder Kunstverein (2023). Astakhishvili’s work has been included in selected group exhibitions at Foundation Pernod Ricard, Paris (2025); MoMA PS1, New York (2025); MACRO Museum, Rome (2024); LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2024); Emalin, London (2024); Kunsthalle Zürich (2023); Galerie Molitor, Berlin (2023); FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2022); Art Hub Copenhagen (2021); Räume für Kunst, Kerpen (2021); Bonner Kunstverein (2021); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2021); and Malmö Konsthall (2019).