Gela Mikava

Gela Mikava (b. 1995, Zugdidi, Georgia)
Lives and works in Tbilisi

Gela Mikava is a Georgian visual artist whose practice centers on inherited trauma, material memory, and the long afterlife of collapsed ideologies. Working primarily with biazi—a Soviet-era cotton textile once used to stretch over ceilings in domestic interiors—Mikava reinvents this utilitarian fabric as a politically charged surface. Each piece of biazi, salvaged from abandoned or renovated homes, carries silent traces of a vanished world: adhesive marks, stains, and the residue of an architecture designed for uniformity.

Mikava refers to his ongoing body of work as an exploration of Post-Socialist Radiation—a term he coined to describe the invisible yet persistent psychological and aesthetic fallout of Soviet ideology in the post-socialist present. His works do not aim to reconstruct a past, but to trace its lingering frequencies in the present: through faded geometries, spectral figures, ghostlike silhouettes of animals, and the cold palette of concrete cities. Human forms often dissolve into their surroundings; uniforms remain intact while faces blur and disappear—gesturing toward the erasure of individuality under collective memory.

Formally trained in pain...

BA & MA in Architecture, Technical University of Georgia

2025 group exhibition Pietà: A Mother’s Lament, held at the University of Dayton, Ohio, USA, from March 4 to May 9,2025 .2024 Solo Exhibition – “Can Be Heard - The Silence, I See - The Nothing”, London.
2024 Group Exhibition – I.D.E.A. Gallery / S.N.O.B. Des., Miami Circle, Atlanta.
2023 Affordable Art Fair – London.
2022 Personal Exhibition – “INITIUMI”, Art Gallery.
2022 Ria Keburia Foundation Gallery – Exhibition “Contrast of War and Peace”, Tribute To The Yellow Wheat Fields And Peaceful, Blue Sky.
2022 The AF Battersea in London – Representative: Galera Tallantyre Gallery.
2022 Affordable Art Fair Hampstead, London (May 4th-8th) – Representative: Galera Tallantyre Gallery.
2022 London Art Fair.
2021 Personal Exhibition – “Three”, Art Gallery Vake.
2021 Mixed Exhibition – “Gambit”, Art Gallery Vake.
2021 Mixed Exhibition – “Spring”, Art Gallery Vake.
2019 Seus Exhibition Hall – Mixed Exhibition “100 Minds”.
2018 Personal Exhibition – “History”, Tiflis Art Branch.
2017 Mixed Exhibition – National Library.
2016 Mixed Exhibition – Technical University Hall.