ASTAKHISHVILI, Tolia; HELLBERG, Fatima; AMMER, Manuela (eds.)
Figure of the Child

Unfolding through accumulation and overprinting, Figure of the Child – published on the occasion of the artist’s eponymous exhibition at mumok, Vienna – focuses on the materiality and the drawings at the heart of Tolia Astakhishvili’s practice.

Here, the concept of the child embodies both a high degree of intellectual and creative autonomy and a profound dependence on others. The “figure of the child” becomes an exercise in imagination, exploring the possibilities and limits of empathy, grounded in the fact that we were all children once. In relation to spatial environments, scale, and precariousness, the child represents a state of being in which invisibility is often experienced with great immediacy and intensity. Accordingly, Tolia Astakhishvili focuses on the experience of art itself, extending it to movement and touch and breaking with the conventions of museum presentation. The notion of the “first encounter,” as children experience it when initially perceiving a phenomenon, serves here as a key to a new kind of experience.

With contributions by Kirsty Bell, Fatima Hellberg, Liesl Ujvary.

Bilingual German / English.

[publishers’ note]

Published by Éditions Empire / mumok, 2026
Artists' Books