Tolia Astakhishvili Demolishes the Bathroom

The morning after the night before: a line of precariously stacked, mismatched glasses stand to attention along a rough ledge (house of mending, 2024–25). In one, a plastic toy or broken ornament – resembling the wings of a fairy – appears to have been dropped. Behind them, the white cistern of a toilet peeps out from behind another low wall. The scene reads like the debris of a bougie party – the kind Venice excels at – albeit set in a sort of tasteful building site.

It’s the hand of Tolia Astakhishvili, who has a knack for imbuing even the most unremarkable objects with a delicate sense of reverence – by combining, concealing and curating them in unorthodox ways. The exhibition, ‘to love and devour’, unfolds across ten battered and incised rooms in a palazzo, with a sense of calm revelation: her sensitivity to the surfaces of the house – both extant and augmented – charges this remarkable show with a measured intensity. It is a testament to what can happen when artists are given the time and resources to truly invest their attention.

Astakhishvili spent four months living here, and you can tell – only that depth of engagement could have produced works so immaculately fused with their environment. Everything feels beautifully unannounced, creating a viewing experience akin to inhabiting an all-encompassing world of unravelling codes and secrets. It’s impossible to see where her interventions end and the palazzo begins; the entire building is both the receptacle of, and conspirator in, the work.

All of this could sound ungenerous or smug, but it is anything but. The involvement of a community of collaborators – including Heike Gallmeier and James Richards – gives the impression that creative lives have unfolded here, and that we are fortunate witnesses to their consequences. Indeed, they have: the 15th-century edifice was one of the storied homes of painter Ettore Tito in the 1920s. Later, the building underwent renovations through the 1970s, including work by architect Angelo Scattolin.

Upstairs, Astakhishvili has demolished the bathroom in a delightfully visual way that compels viewers to consider a trick of perspective: the missing partition wall creates the optical illusion of a mirror (my emptiness, 2025). The space it reveals is clad in canvases that butt up against one another like the padding of a cell (daydreaming, 2024–25). Scratchy words and images, reminiscent of those you might find on a toilet door, appear throughout the building – painted directly onto surfaces in works like beautiful neighbour II (2016–24), and in framed drawings scattered across the floor in another room (a timeline of physical attributes, 2025).

A nearby space appears entirely charred, as if a fire had occurred there: collections of found objects – including chipped fragments of Murano glass – nestle in piles near the perimeter (universe, 2025). There’s a sense of narrative in all these gestures, reminiscent of a Mike Nelson installation. The most theatrical moment is a locked room within a room: its walls are made of translucent glass, behind which light illuminates the objects stacked on shelves inside (I love seeing myself through the eyes of others, 2025). We see the outlines of rotary fans and tangled cables and can only imagine what goes on within.

Astakhishvili has upheaved this home: the word ‘demolished’ appears in the elegant accompanying leaflet, almost listed as a material – for example, ‘demolished bathroom’. But demolition doesn’t equal destruction here; it resembles something closer to archaeological work with a speculative-fiction slant, where gestures of deconstruction, subtraction and addition lead to a sense of learning – an understanding of the fabric of the space and how it absorbs and preserves historical experience. The results are mesmeric. 

Tolia Astakhishvili’s ‘to love and devour’ is at Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, Venice, until 23 November

_{Main image: Tolia Astakhishvili, each year, the same season, 2025, plexiglass, acrylic paint, wood, 4.8 × 1.8 m. Courtesy: the artist}