Andro Wekua

Andro Wekua (*1977) works in a range of media, including collage, painting, sculpture, installation and film. The Georgian-born, Berlin-based artist has built a personal cosmos in which he stages fragmented memories, personal and political, through assemblage-like visual strategies. The artist illuminates the dark, interstitial spaces of emotion with subtle symbolism and intuitive elegance, highlighting the ambiguities of history. Wekua’s work is distinguished by a highly affective resonance. This resonance is most prominently seen in the mannequin figures that permeate his entire work, appearing alongside other visual motifs such as houses, landscapes, faces and machines. They emerge in the form of photographs in collages or come to life as sculptures. The mannequin figures in installations such as Get out of my room (2006) seem to derive their origins less from art history than from the design language of shop-window dummies or cyborgs from the worlds of science fiction. Their expressionless faces—which can at best be described as generic—are sometimes completely obliterated in the collages. The sculptures, such as the twitching figure in Untitled (2014), shown in the exhibition Some Pheasants in Singularity , are often seen wearing contemporary clothing like tank tops or sneakers. For all their overt artificiality, these mannequin figures seem endowed with a psychological life of their own. Defying all probability, they seem strangely alive, even realistic. They are figures that emanate a disturbing power. Wekua’s exhibitions usually consist of elaborately-staged configurations executed with great attention to detail. The artist uses architectural interventions to create spatial and atmospheric scenarios, mise en scènes invoked by the curated rhythm of sculptures and paintings, choice of wall color, floor covering and lighting. This desire to stage is also brought to bear in his moving-image works. The artist’s films are enigmatic, at times surreal visual compositions; his manipulation of visual material, color, editing and music create metaphorically dense, quasi-hypnotic atmospheres with a powerful draw on the viewer.