Tolia Astakhishvili: To Love and Devour
2829 Sestiere Dorsoduro Venezia
May 8 - November 23, 2025
The Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation presents To Love and Devour, a site-specific environment by Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili that transforms the fabric of a Venetian palazzo into a space of vulnerability, resistance, and shared presence. Conceived during a residency in early 2025, the installation is shaped by the artist’s lived experience in the building—now reimagined as both sanctuary and stage for a complex emotional architecture.
Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition unfolds as a porous and evolving composition, where walls remember, objects speak, and rooms echo with traces of cohabitation. Drawing from the intimate and the communal, Astakhishvili crafts a spatial narrative of becoming—where memory, identity, and material fragility converge.
This immersive work is enriched by collaborations with a group of invited artists—Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards, and Maka Sanadze—whose contributions weave into the installation like voices in a whispered dialogue.
To Love and Devour is less an exhibition than a lived atmosphere—a place where art, life, and architecture cohabit and dissolve into one another.