I love seeing myself through the eyes of others, 2025

In Dorsoduro 2829, a historic but unassuming property on a quiet canal near Campo San Barnaba in Venice, the visitor is confronted by a row of dusty glasses on a ledge, some stacked one on top of another. The effect is uncanny – it feels as though they are left over from a party and need to be washed up and put away. The glasses are struckn by occasional sunlight falling through the trees of the building’s courtyard.

Here, as elsewhere in Tolia Astakhishvili’s installation to love and devour at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, we are unsettled by the artist’s ready-mades and their capacity for evocation. It would be easy to wander into this building and confuse it for an abandoned home or recently-occupied space. Astakhishvili lived and worked here for the first three months of 2025, gradually transforming and fragmenting the building. She knocked down walls and added new ones, brought in artworks by herself and other collaborators, and shifted the layout of the rooms.

On the first floor a ledge is covered with what seem to be family photographs. In the space next door, a bed is made on a hard wooden platform. The fragile pipework of a stripped-out bathroom floats against a wall that seems to have been removed, as though a line drawing in three dimensions has been uncovered. Her fragile drawings mark the walls like traces, small graffiti that speak to a longer exchange with the building itself. Canvases bearing the traces of drawings cover two sides of a room, almost like modernist panelling. Perhaps most moving is a room with frosted glass walls within another room, noise emanating from within. These room-scapes feel like the stuff of dreams or childhood memory, challenging and somehow just out of reach. Each space is – as curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has written – “a temporal opening that projects into the future and returns to past realms”; as Astakhishvili puts it in the show’s catalogue, “Everything is now”.

My emptiness, 2025

This show builds on Astakhishvili’s longstanding engagement with the textures, histories and memories of domestic and architectural spaces, and her commitment to collaboration. Alongside the artist’s work is a roll call of friends and collaborators, with Astakhishvili inviting Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards and Maka Sanadze – the artist’s mother – to participate. While a guide indicates authorship through a detailed plan of the building, there’s still a blur of the individual and collective.

Moving through the building, which will subsequently be renovated as an exhibition space for the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, there is a palpable sense of haunting, as though each room has just been exited by some unknown or unperceived figure. Unlike so many art foundations in the city, this is not a grand space. Through Astakhishvili’s installation, each room is inhabited with a sense of abandonment and uncertainty, a questioning and perhaps even a longing that remains with you long after you leave. A sense lingers that space, buildings and objects actively shape memory.

Behind the row of glasses is a small white maquette of a house, filled with small glass objects. Light streams through, catching the dust. In the show’s catalogue, Obrist and Astakhishvili brainstorm titles: Endless House, Endless Room, Perpetual House, Half State. This installation opens out from the materiality of this building, collapsing past and future into perpetuity, in an exchange with memory that feels fragile yet limitless . .