“Every space is a body—it wounds, it heals, and sometimes it rebuilds itself.”
— Tolia Astakhishvili
London’s Emalin Gallery hosts the first UK solo exhibition by Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili. A Wound on My Plate is a large-scale installation that weaves together architecture, the body, and memory as interconnected layers. Astakhishvili reimagines the gallery not merely as an exhibition space but as a living, breathing organism.
The exhibition, shaped by months of spatial interventions, sprawls across walls, floors, and even hidden crevices, forming a cohesive whole. It integrates painting, drawing, sound, video, sculpture, and architectural elements while tracing the imprints of the unseen, forgotten, or abandoned.
The Wounds of Space
Astakhishvili’s practice centers on excavating the emotional traces accumulated on the surfaces of a home or room. The gallery walls become carriers of a story; every crack and shadow reemerges as an echo of the past. Using what might be considered the “debris” of everyday life—broken door handles, wooden fragments, rusty screws, scratched photographs—the artist constructs a wounded yet living space. At the core of this process lies the human impulse to both create and destroy.
Interwoven Layers, Interwoven Lives
A Wound on My Plate is not solely Tolia Astakhishvili’s creation but a collaborative space with her father, Zurab Astakhishvili, and artists Dylan Peirce and James Richards. These collaborations amplify the exhibition’s polyphonic structure, with each contribution adding a new visual or auditory layer to the space. The result is a kind of psychological architecture: thoughts echoing between walls, shadows tracing the path of sound, a state of consciousness that transcends the boundaries of a home. Astakhishvili’s works pull viewers out of architecture’s rigid framework and into a sensory, transient realm. The space is no longer a static structure but a living, breathing, even bleeding entity.
The Memory of the Forgotten
As in her previous exhibitions, ghosts of the past haunt this one. Invisible memories linger like faded paint on walls; fragments of photographs, handwritten notes, and sound recordings form a kind of inner archive. Astakhishvili’s language is both intuitive and analytical: a quiet yet intense narrative poised between personal history and collective memory.
A Wound on My Plate reimagines architecture as a wound and space as its healing process. Astakhishvili’s London exhibition transforms the human-space relationship into an emotional, physical, and existential experience.
Emalin Gallery – The Clerk’s House
118½ Shoreditch High Street, London
On view through December 13, 2025
