The First Finger (chapter II) at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin mixes the Tbilisi-born artist’s orphaned works with collaborations and standalone artworks by 12 other artists
The phrase The First Finger refers to a situation most people would prefer to avoid. In extreme cold, blood flows protectively from the extremities to the organs; at some point, frozen digits start to break off, and the human body reduces itself to what this exhibition’s booklet guide calls ‘a life-sustaining core’. That ‘core’ twists metaphoric as you navigate Tolia Astakhishvili’s show, a sequel of sorts to a recent one at Bonner Kunstverein, which mixes the Tbilisi-born artist’s orphaned junk installations, paintings and drawings with collaborations and standalone artworks by 12 other artists and writers. The century-old Haus am Waldsee was once a manufacturing magnate’s villa and, as its name suggests, still feels somewhat domestic. Here, it pointedly offers asylum to artworks across its two floors but doesn’t make ‘home’ synonymous with safety; at points, this show proffers the most unsettling pseudo-dwelling space this side of a Gregor Schneider installation.
On entering, you’re plunged into Astakhishvili’s I am the secret meat (2022), a darkened room whose inset Plexiglas windows are smeared with shit-brown acrylic and scratched with gnomic abstract marks; propped raw plasterboard suggests we’re interrupting someone’s haywire internal renovations. In the main ground-floor space – past an untitled and undated Judith Scott sculpture (of aquamarine and lavender wool wrapped around a big bushel of twigs) that turns crocheting monstrous – we reach Ser Serpas’s oil-on-unstretched-jute painting Untitled (2022): a nude torso, seen from the rear, bloodred paint splattered across it, the figure’s arms folded behind it as if for execution, head decapitated by canvas edge. Oblique bad stuff happening turns out to be one of the show’s leifmotifs: upstairs, Astakhishvili’s collaboration with Dylan Peirce, I have no constraints, the only limit is me (2023), presents a large corrugated-metal box from which emanates an eight-channel, 50-minute audio installation of portentous abstract clanks, metallic scrapings, rumbles, hisses, etc. Elsewhere, several deceptively artless installations by Astakhishvili suggest a deceased person’s effects that the living don’t know what to do with: unruly rows of model boats laid out on window-sills, stained footballs, things that look like beekeepers’ and falconers’ gear, blank architectural models.
But if this isn’t a happy homestead, it’s one in which disquiet, pain and imperfection coexist with the fact of shelter. See, also, the crumbling Manhattan piers repurposed as a cruising ground in Alvin Baltrop’s glimmering monochrome photographs (undated, 1975–86), which preserve, after a fashion, a now-gone secret holdout and are preserved in turn here; or a classically anguished archival drawing by Antonin Artaud (Untitled, 1947). The existential instability in the standalone works spreads, like Astakhishvili’s various sporelike interventions on the walls in watercolour and coffee, to infect everything else. Architecture and artwork collapse together, one-person-show becomes group show, viewers are invited to laminate their own speculative narratives on the makeshift, gap-speckled mise-en-scène. In Astakhishvili and James Richards’s collaborative work I Remember (Depth of Flattened Cruelty) (2023), a ten-minute video walkthrough of The First Finger (chapter I) becomes an artwork via weird, fearful distorted views and a fractured soundtrack. As with everything here in some sense, it’s not what it was – it’s the original show deformed, missing a few parts – but, for now, it’s still alive.
The First Finger (chapter II) at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, 23 June – 24 September
