Half State

Tolia Astakhishvili’s (b. 1974 in Tbilisi, Georgia) installations fuse places and narratives in three dimensions, using sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, video, and writing. Her work unfolds as a series of nested interiors, collaged worlds within worlds where multiple registers intersect and collide. In this simultaneity, architecture becomes a structural material, responsive and unfixed, rewritten by the bodies and histories that move through it. The pictures in this book gesture towards an architecture of fracture and accumulation, that confronts the instability of perception, the afterlife of objects, and the difficulties of inhabiting this world at all.

In a memoir-style text, written in dialogue with Tolia’s works, artist and writer Jacksun Bein charts the life of a child that refuses to fully exit the womb. Researcher Livia Polanyi’s email correspondence explores how memory lives on between time and language.