Mariam AkubardiaA Man Waiting for a Bus (2025)

A figure waits near the Enguri Bridge, a crossing point between occupied and unoccupied Georgia, “carrying the weight of exhaustion, grief, and memory”. The river beneath the bridge marks the dividing line between Georgian-controlled territory and Abkhazia, a region under Russian occupation since the war of the early 1990s, which displaced much of its Georgian population. For those who remain on the other side or who return to visit, the bridge is the only link between a present life and the homes, graves, and relatives left behind. An empty gaze recalls the faces the artist knew as a child: people forced to flee, without home, impoverished, internally displaced. Behind the figure, a Soviet mosaic stretches across the wall. Within it, a sculpted character reaches toward a radiant star, an image of utopian promise that Akubardia describes as “hollow and silent”, while “histories are divided”. A large-leaved plant rises beside the man, bringing the subtropical vegetation of Abkhazia into the scene. Born in Gali, the district at the edge of this boundary, the artist grew up among the consequences the painting depicts. Soviet mosaics recur throughout her work as the remnants of a collective vision that once promised progress and now fades in abandoned public spaces.