By PAYAM SHARIFI

One does not look at Andro Wekua’s work. One stares—at the Technicolor seeping through a pierced old-world modernism; at the muzzled gazes of mannequins, disarmingly half-dressed. We stare at that which we do not understand, and Wekua’s figures, landscapes, and palette come from a parallel universe, brushing up against ours, overlapping in incidental imagery, but distinctly foreign. It is a world inhabited by peoples who are neither the hopeful Homo sapiens nor the melancholic Homo Sovieticus—or is it the other way around?—to which the rest of us belong and have grown accustomed. Wekua’s exhibition titles—“My Bike and Your Swamp,” “Wait to Wait”—provide a refreshing two-step to an impressive succession of blockbuster shows in Brussels (Wiels), New York (Barbara Gladstone), and London (Camden Arts Centre), all within the span of little more than a year. The twilight sway of identification in Wekua’s work stems in part from his origins. He was born in Sukhumi, Georgia in 1977, the capital of Abkhazia and a town on the Black Sea, inaccessible to Georgians since the early 1990s. The region is one of many frozen conflicts within the post-Soviet sphere: history has moved on, even if the people have not, cannot. The region’s independence is recognized only by the retro troika of Russia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The artist does not, however, deal discursively with the theme of exile. His Get out of my room (2006) presents an inner psychology equally at ease within the cosmology of teenage angst as within early 20th-century scenography. In 2010, in a supposedly post-historical, post-racial world, surely we can move beyond identity politics: his and our selves, as it were, are saddled with a simultaneous collapse and proliferation of geography. We belong to many places, remember few, and pledge allegiance to none. A certain indistinguishability—if resistance was the rage of modernity then escape has become our arsenal of necessity—allows us to breathe in without the surgical mask to filter out meaning, but we remain apprehensive of where to go for our next gasp. This indistinguishability becomes both our handicap and the card up our sleeve.

Wekua is based between Zurich and Berlin, where I visited him in his studio. The softness of his phrases and features belie a fierce intelligence, one shaped by a healthy distance from his surroundings, be they the Caucasus or Kreuzberg. I am reminded of Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel laureate whose passionate words about the second half of the 20th century have survived well into the first half of the 21st. Both navigate the landmines of identity and exile with effortless immediacy—Milosz in poetry, novels, and essays; Wekua in painting, collage, installation, and sculpture. So it is that we may read Wekua through Milosz, and try to better understand that rare artistic feat: the hat trick of attraction, repulsion, and confusion made necessary by today’s tyranny of transparency.