Andro Wekua

Placed at the intersection of history, memory and fantasy, the work of Andro Wekua (born in 1977, lives and works in Berlin) gives rise to a feeling of disquieting eeriness. He presents here a condensed version of his mnemonic investigations with a sculpture, a film and an environment. The three come together in order to create a feeling of claustrophobia, even dread: Untitled (2011), a wax mannequin with its head encapsulated in a house echoes a short film bordering on science fiction, entitled Never Sleep With a Strawberry in Your Mouth II (2010-2012). In both works someone or something takes possession of your mind. Originally from Georgia in the former USSR—a country he was forced to flee during childhood—Andro Wekua has kept in his work traces of this ‘elsewhere’. His wax figures built to human scale seem to protect themselves from the outside world by the richness of their most intimate thoughts while his paintings refer to the 20th-century avant-garde and his miniature models are memories of the communist architecture of his past.