Tolia Astakhishvili and Kirsty Bell

RSVP

Writer Kirsty Bell joins artist Tolia Astakhisvhili in conversation on the first weekend of Tolia Astakhishvili: between father and mother, Tolia’s exhibition at SculptureCenter.

In recent years, Kirsty Bell has been an observer of and participant in Tolia’s work. Her texts have appeared alongside or within Tolia’s recent exhibitions at Bonner Kunstverein and Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

Bell’s recent book projects include the indispensable The Artist’s House: From Workplace to Artwork (Sternberg Press, 2013), a wide-ranging inquiry into interrelations of living- and working-spaces that have inflected art practices as diverse as those of Gregor Schneider, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, and Alice Neel, among many others; and Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin (Other Press, 2022), a geographical, political, cultural, and personal history of the city that unfolds across passages of localized attention and elastic historical breadth, told in parallel to Bell’s coming and going from her own home on the Landwehr Canal.

This meeting dips into Tolia’s and Bell’s shared attunement to the resonance (the “shadow existence,” as Bell has written of Tolia’s work) of buildings, homes, and cities.

Kirsty Bell is a British-American writer and art critic living in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was a contributing editor of frieze from 2011-2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist’s House, and her essays have appeared in over seventy exhibition catalogs for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, London.

Tolia Astakhishvili works and lives in Berlin and Tbilisi. Astakhishvili's recent solo exhibitions include The First Finger (chapter II), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023); The First Finger, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2023); I Think It's Closed, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld (2023). Her work has been included in exhibitions at Emalin, London (2024); Sweetwater, Berlin (2024); Kunsthalle Zürich (2023); Molitor Gallery, Berlin (2023); LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2023); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2022); Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna (2022); LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2022); Art Hub Copenhagen, Copenhagen (2021); Räume für Kunst, Kerpen (2021); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2021); Capitain Petzel Galerie, Berlin (2021); Goethe Institute Bulgaria / Earth and Man National Museum, Sofia (2019); Malmö Konsthall, Malmö (2019); Cabinet, London (2018).