Andro Wekua: Some Pheasants in Singularity, Sprüth Magers

Andro Wekua was born in Georgia in the 1970s, as an art student he witnessed the crumbling of the Soviet Union, the killing of his father in the Sukhumi riots of 1989 and the ethnic cleansing of Georgians by Abkhaz nationalists in the early 1990s. It is a personal background that is inextricably linked to the political struggles of recent history.

It is no surprise then that his installations toy with the idea of gaining a perspective of personal memory through unconventional objects. His architectural models often reference buildings from his home town of Sukhumi, whilst his films contain fragments of material and found footage from his childhood.

Sprüth Magers exhibition

Wekua has spoken in the past about his need to create something both artificial and natural. The works in his new show at Sprüth Magers’ London gallery achieve that ambition through a process of estrangement. The mannequins, the models and the collages are constructed through making and remembering Wekua’s own history, until a personal reality becomes a distant fiction.