'a wound on my plate': Tolia Astakhishvili at Emalin, London

a wound on my plate, Emalin, 118 ½ Shoreditch High Street, London. 

By ARAM MASHARQA December 2, 2025

Tolia Astakhishvili’s a wound on my plate felt like walking in on something we weren’t supposed to see. It arises out of the artist’s month-long engagement with the space and is the artist’s first UK solo exhibition. The gallery is more than simply lived-in: wooden floors are covered in grey vinyl, windows boarded up, pipe work painted, dismantled. Everyday detritus, so banal that it resists naming, is scattered throughout the show. The show hinges on how the built environment transfers meaning to the viewer; too little or too much given away, and the show could easily slip into the opaque.

The show is, as Sean Burns writes in Frieze, ‘a narrative environment in the vein of her former tutor Mike Nelson’. However, it isn’t clear what the ‘narrative’ is just at a glance, and the show frustrates the viewer’s attempts to piece together a narrative. On the ground floor, nearly hardened cold (2025) displays gestural, bodily forms behind translucent plexiglass, illuminated in such a way that depth is created in its very ambiguation. This illusion of depth is broken by drawings on paper attached to the plexiglass (the show gives, then takes away), containing accumulations of scribbles, figures, and loose text. These, alongside an amalgam of found objects, leads Chris Fite-Wassilak ('London Roundup') to write that ‘the house feels as if abandoned in a hurry, with junk lining the hallways and the edges of every room’. Indeed, the lack of narrative through-line had the effect of walking in on the abject spectacle of someone else’s mess, revealing but strange.

Tolia Astakhishvili with sound by Dylan Peirce, ‘nearly hardened cold’, 2025. Installation view. Courtesy of Emalin.

However, the exhibition is not an un-curated assortment of miscellanea. Slowly, as the viewer spends longer in the space, small decisions reveal an almost compulsive effort to exercise control over the space. There is an almost imperceptible sound piece emanating throughout the show, produced in collaboration with her long-time collaborator Dylan Pierce. I missed this at first, as my mind registered the sounds as the familiar ambience of a home. Likewise, reaching the boarded-up windows on the first floor, I recognized the boards as a clear intervention from the artist, but took for granted the beaming white light from behind, creating the effect of daylight. Once I reached the attic, I was engulfed in this uncanny recreation of a home: the unmistakeable smell of the attic; the piles of ‘junk’ around the room, only coming into view as my eyes adjusted to the pitch-black darkness; and a collaborative work with James Richards, From Communion to Cannibalism (2018-25). The work brings together photographs of earlier installations cut against found images, medical diagrams and incidental fragments, circling through these dislocations automatically and mechanically, each slide announced by a haunting mechanical click and turn. As I proceeded back down the house, imperceptible details began to fit together as a concerted, multi-sensory intervention in the space.

Tolia Astakhishvili and James Richards, ‘From Communion to Cannibalism’, 2018-25. Installation view. Courtesy of Emalin.

The risk is of slipping into intervention for intervention’s sake. Art historian David Joselit uses ‘aggregation’ to describe the trend in contemporary art of artists searching, compiling, and then presenting an accumulation of information as their work. Such aggregation has been criticized as merely presenting an ambience of research, lacking ‘an original framework’ (Bishop, 'Information Overload'). This exhibition, however, manages to sidestep this pitfall, albeit narrowly. Astakhishvili presents a form of curated space which ‘think[s] with the senses in all their diversity’ (Lee, 'The Invisible Hand'). This space is decidedly non-didactic: she does not use the space to ‘tell us something’, privileging the viewer, but takes the space of the house on its own terms. There is a child-like curiosity with which drawings are displayed on the walls, window-sills are adorned with figurines, and a den of mirrors, between the legs (2025), is built on the first floor. This structure and the adjacent Delicate dump dusty all recently decorated (2025), a painted theatre backdrop on canvas covering the entire wall, again create an illusion of depth whilst relishing in its tricks of the eye, reflecting a fascination with space.

‘Delicate dump dusty all recently decorated', 2025.. Installation view. Courtesy of Emalin.

This show, then, goes beyond site-specific art as art which simply responds to the space in which it was built or displayed. It remains radically specific and personal throughout, appropriating space much as how the grey laminate and generic layout of a city rental would be appropriated by its tenants to transform the house into a home. I mentioned the connection to Mike Nelson, her tutor, above, and it is easy to connect the aesthetics of their work. Their difference, I would argue, is this radical site-specificity, in contrast to Nelson’s self-contained narrative environments which travel the world, featuring at biennials and touring exhibitions. The Emalin show makes best sense right where it is: in the oldest building in Shoreditch.

Collaged works in the office by the artist’s father who passed earlier this year, titled I can’t imagine how can I die if I am so alive, remind us that the lived-in feeling is personal remembrance, a kind of secret, singular nostalgia. As she says in an interview with Olesia Shuvarikova, ‘everything is a collaboration with, or a memory of, someone or something else’. The various collaborative interventions across the space show that this is not the home of an artist living and working alone. This networked polyphony creates an environment which does not invite us in, but, through its specificity, demonstrates that home is not ‘place’ alone, but is precisely what we do with it.

Tolia Astakhishvili and Zurab Astakhishvili, 'I can’t imagine how can I die if I am so alive', 1986–ongoing. Courtesy of Emalin.

Tolia Astakhishvili, a wound on my plate, Emalin, 118 ½ Shoreditch High Street, October 03 – December 13, 2025.

Further Reading

1. Bishop, Claire. ‘Information Overload’, Artforum, April 2023.
2. Burns, Sean. ‘The Best Shows to See in London During Frieze’, Frieze, 14 October 2025.
3. Fite-Wassilak, Chris. ‘London Roundup’, e-flux Criticism, 16 October 2025. 
4. Joselit, David. ‘On Aggregators’, in October, Fall 2013, vol. 146 (2013): 3-18.
5. Lee, Pamela M. ’The Invisible Hand of Curation’, in Aesthetics and Contemporary Art. Sternberg Press, 2011.
6. Shuvarikova, Olesia. ‘to love and devour. A Conversation with Tolia Astakhishvili’, Flash Art, 2 September 2025.