Mariam Akubardia
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mariam Akubardia (b. 1991, Gali, Abkhazia, Georgia) is a Georgian painter and multidisciplinary visual artist based in Tbilisi. Displaced from her home during the Abkhazian war in early childhood and later raised in occupied Gali, her practice explores memory, displacement, loss, and the persistence of belonging through painting, installation, and collaborative projects.
Rooted in personal and collective experiences of conflict, Akubardia revisits landscapes, domestic
spaces, and public buildings that exist today primarily through fragments of memory. Her paintings often depict abandoned cities, damaged kindergartens, hospitals, Soviet-era sanatoriums, and subtropical environments, where citrus trees, palms, and cacti coexist with traces of absence and survival.
Akubardia’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in private collections across Europe and Australia. In 2019, she won the Bauhaus Women competition organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation South Caucasus and the Bauhaus Project. In 2023, she was featured by Harper’s Bazaar Germany as one of the most important emerging artists. Her work has been discussed in the academic essay Violence of Tropicalization: On the Politics of Cold and Whiteness in the Subtropics of the Caucasus as part of a broader consideration of artistic practices engaging with tropicality, nature, and experiences of displacement.
Together with her husband, she co-authored 6200, a comic book about the lives of internally displaced people, initiated in 2020 and published by ZTSCRPT in Berlin in 2023.
PROJECT DURING BORDERLAND RESIDENCIES
Everything Is the Palms’ Fault
Combining painting and installation, this ongoing project explores women’s quiet resistance through the story of my grandmother, who stayed in her home during the war in Abkhazia and transformed a devastated landscape into a lush garden. Inspired by the superstition that palm trees brought misfortune, the work revisits her garden through metal palms, agaves, sculptural elements, and paintings, exploring memory, care, and resilience.