Studio Visit - Interview with Gela Mikava
Interviewer (curator): Gabriela Azar
Introduction (curator).
Visiting Gela Mikava's studio is to stand inside an ongoing excavation of memory and politics - a place where private dreams collide with public histories and form emerges from layered fragments. The conversation that follows moves between the philosophical and the technical: how the unconscious becomes pictorial, how personal archives face global networks, and how painting can both diagnose and attempt to cleanse the residues of ideology.
Q1. Gela, your work carries a strong emotional energy and an intuitive structure. What is the first impulse that drives you to the canvas? Does it come from a preformed idea, an emotion, or a deeper subconscious process?
A1 (Gela Mikava).
If you asked me at different moments of my life, I would give different answers - and I think that is the essence of being alive. My practice evolves; I don't want to become fixed. Often the process begins with fragments: images, sounds, sensations that return from life and memory. Over time those fragments are reordered in my mind and then materialize on the canvas. It is not a single source but a continual becoming - a dialogue between thought and matter.
Q2. When you say thought and mental processes materialize on the canvas, how much do you control that transformation? Are you making conscious decisions, or do you function as an intermediary for something that happens naturally?
A2 (Gela Mikava).
I control the idea - the attempt to convey what arrives in fragments when I work on a certain canvas. There can be several images or fragments on one surface. Achieving form often happens automatically; I try not to force it into rigid control. It feels like awakening a force rather than mastering it. The conscious move is to arrange the ingredients; the emergence of form is more like responding to a living thing inside the work.
Q3. There is a persistent tension in your work between figuration and abstraction - as if two languages try to dissolve and fuse. Is this purely a visual experiment, or does it carry symbolic weight related to identity, human nature, or social issues?
A3 (Gela Mikava).
When I dream, many details feel real. But when I recall that dream, every detail abstracts; what was figural in the dream becomes abstract in memory. I believe that daily: memory breaks forms apart and attempts to recombine them. Figuration appears only when I strain the mind to pull a detail out of abstraction. So the tension is both visual and symbolic - an account of how memory and identity reconfigure themselves, how personal fragments meet collective forms.
Q4. Do you see the artist's role as processing this dream-like memory - an archaeological work of the mind - or as preserving it intact, leaving the unconscious undisturbed?
A4 (Gela Mikava).
It is rather like having a pantry of ingredients I've seen, heard, and felt across my life. Now I pull these from their shelves and reorder them into ideas. With age and experience, these ingredients are reconsidered and recontextualized against current events. The collision between those reordered elements becomes abstraction and figuration meeting one another. So the artist both analyzes and preserves; both acts are part of the same operation.
Q5. How does your environment - your country, the contemporary context - affect this process? Is your work a response to social and historical contexts, or primarily an individual investigation?
A5 (Gela Mikava).
The world is globalized; the internet has become a new Tower of Babel where diverse forms share a common content. My research is individual but rests on social and historical contexts and their rethinking. The language of my forms may be local, but the content is global and appears in different tongues. I can address post-socialist radiation, for example, and someone elsewhere will read it as regional or personal - yet it transcends the local. Regimes and ideologies leave toxic afterlives that persist long after their collapse; my work speaks to how those residues continue to shape society.
Q6. If regimes and ideologies poison societies even after they end, can art confront that toxic legacy? Is painting for you purification, affirmation, or critique?
A6 (Gela Mikava).
I need to pass through all three stages in this order: critique, affirmation, purification. First comes the act of questioning - to name and make visible the reality that stands beside us. Then affirmation: to assert and transmit that finding to the viewer. Purification may not be achieved, but the public naming and communication are the right path. The work's duty, as I see it, is to notice - to make present what everyone experiences but rarely observes.
Q7. Looking forward, how do you see your practice developing? Will you move toward technical experiments, or remain primarily focused on investigations of consciousness expressed in new forms?
A7 (Gela Mikava).
Both are necessary. To sustain the practice, consciousness research must move to a new level - a new dimension. You cannot win every battle with a single tool; you need to invent new ones. Therefore deeper investigations of consciousness require technical risks. The conceptual and the technical must evolve together: new forms of thought demand new formal experiments.
Concluding note (curator).
Gela Mikava's answers trace a method of painting that is equally philosophical and practical: an ongoing forensic reading of memory and ideology, enacted through formal experiments and material risk. The studio emerges as a laboratory where the artist both interprets and reconfigures the residues of history, inviting the viewer to witness the collision of fragments and the slow, often uneasy work of seeing.
31 October 2025
