I Wish I Had A Time Machine
HALLE13 STMK

HALLE13 presents a duo exhibition by Gvantsa Jishkariani and Karo Kuchar, two artists from Tbilisi and Vienna whose works open distinct yet interwoven reflections on time, material, and memory.

Gvantsa Jishkariani (b. 1991, Rustavi, Georgia) reworks Soviet textiles with her own hands to engage with the intercultural legacies of Georgian society. Reworked with English-language embroidery, hybrid forms emerge that speak to both personal position and shared history. These works bear witness to multiplicity: everyday acts of care interweave with grand cultural discourses. More than relics, they carry a palpable heritage of materiality and temporality-registering what has been passed down while reimagining it in the present.

Karo Kuchar (b. 1986, Austria, Polish-Czech origin) turns her gaze to the now and its distensions. As Paula Platzl writes: "It is always today, always now. Yesterday has passed, tomorrow remains speculative. The human, caught in the fleeting now, is swept along by time-unstoppable, irrevocable. Karo Kuchar resists this linearity."

Her wall works bring backgrounds to the foreground, using architectural skins as fragile, stretched thresholds. In her altar piece, sewing and stretch fabrics are transformed into a postmodern triptych: an inverted clock where time runs discontinuously, mirrored doors that part like labial folds to reveal a space of reappraisal. The tradition of European memento mori-with its cycles of life and death-is here unsettled, transformed into an arrow pointing toward an unstable center of experience. Instead of resolution, Kuchar creates provocation without dominance, an opening without closure.

Together, these works create different experiences of memory, different reflections on the discourses that have shaped us-not to judge but to attune ourselves to more open-ended meditations on the present's possibilities. The works themselves promote a more distributive appraisal of objecthood, empowering us to imagine what futures become possible when we attend to the frayed edges, the backgrounds previously taken for granted or dismissed as disposable.

At HALLE13, Jishkariani and Kuchar have created a new sort of time machine-one that presents neither a singular narrative of the past nor a prescribed experience of the present, but instead allows us to inhabit the current moment in a more nuanced, detailed, and sensuous way. This time machine transports us not backward or forward, but into a reinvigorated vision of the present from which we might more coherently chart new futures.