Pages

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Tolia Astakhishvili at Bonner Kunstverein

(link)

Honestly just fun to scroll through. Its got that early Christoph Buchel en-abyme labyrinth without all the movie-set theater. Or Simon Fujiwara without the tradeshow pedagogy. It's replaced with a recursive shifting of scales. Models and images and cutouts make for a loss of footing in endless virtual passe-partout all existing concurrently in the digital, works incredibly well in digital images. The Synecdoche New York of exhibition space, deteriorating separations between imagery and reality. Architecture, white gallery space, the virtual plane, they have always only been metaphors for your skull.

artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or Christmas from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust. 

The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday... 

See too: Simon FujiwaraThe ModelAnna Zacharoff at KantineGhislaine Leung at Reading International