ART CITIES:Vienna-Tolia Astakhishvili
Following a series of critically acclaimed international presentations, Tolia Astakhishvili now realizes her first solo museum exhibition at mumok with “Tolia Curriculum”, an ambitious long-duration project that radically rethinks the temporality and structure of exhibition-making. Conceived as an evolving and process-oriented format, the exhibition unfolds over several months, during which visitors are invited to witness the installation as it is continuously built, altered, and inhabited.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: mumok Archive
By opening up phases of production that are typically concealed from public view, Astakhishvili intervenes in conventional museum logistics and reframes the exhibition not as a fixed display, but as a condition of perpetual transformation.
Rather than presenting a completed environment, “Tolia Curriculum” foregrounds instability, incompletion, and transition. The exhibition becomes a living architecture in flux: walls shift, materials accumulate, objects migrate, and traces of labor remain visible. Visitors encounter the work while it is still taking shape, exposing processes usually hidden behind institutional timelines and emphasizing exhibition-making itself as a spatial and performative act. In doing so, Astakhishvili expands her longstanding interest in embeddedness, memory, and inhabitation into the structure of the museum itself, transforming it into a site of continuous negotiation between construction and decay, intimacy and estrangement, visibility and concealment.
At the core of the project lies Astakhishvili’s collaborative methodology. Throughout the exhibition period, “Tolia Curriculum” unfolds through an ongoing public program of workshops, screenings, readings, performances, and participatory formats for children and adults. These activities emerge from the artist’s understanding of collective practice as a form of learning and shared inhabitation. Bringing close collaborators into the exhibition process, Astakhishvili opens her practice of exchange and distributed authorship to the public, dissolving boundaries between artist, institution, contributor, and audience. Contributors include artists James Richards and Veronica Brovall, researchers and writers Livia Polanyi and Kristian Vistrup Madsen, poet Liesl Ujvary, and mumok architect Laurids Ortner, each participating in the exhibition as an evolving ecosystem of voices, gestures, and interventions.
Within this shifting architectural landscape, the museum itself becomes studio, stage, archive, and temporary shelter. Astakhishvili treats space not as a neutral container but as something emotionally and materially charged—shaped by occupation, abandonment, memory, and the accumulation of traces over time. Her installations often resemble fragmented interiors or provisional structures haunted by previous presences, where found materials, drawings, sound, video, and sculptural elements coexist in states of tension and vulnerability. In “Tolia Curriculum”, these concerns are amplified through duration and public access, allowing visitors to experience the exhibition not as a static object but as a continuously unfolding condition.
The project also establishes the conceptual framework for Astakhishvili’s forthcoming large-scale exhibition “Figure of the Child” (20 June–1 November 2026), spanning two floors of the museum. If “Tolia Curriculum” functions as an open process of spatial and collective experimentation, “Figure of the Child” extends these investigations into questions of perception, dependency, imagination, and emotional memory. Together, the two projects position Astakhishvili’s practice at the threshold between the temporary world of exhibition-making and the rhythms of lived experience, transforming the museum into a porous environment in which artistic production remains permanently unfinished, inhabited, and alive.
Photo: Tolia Astakhishvili, Tolia Curriculum, 2026 Courtesy of the artist Design: Syndicat
Info: Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 22/5-18/6/2026, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10;00-20:00, www.mumok.at/
