Liste Art Fair Basel 2026

Bukia Vakhania is pleased to present David Apakidze's solo presentation for Liste Art Basel 2026.

This installation continues Davit Apakidze’s ongoing series using salvaged car doors as architectural and emotional relics of migration, memory and survival.

Within an old car door, he installs a stained-glass landscape depicting a masked, black-clad armed figure holding a rifle against a bright pastoral background of yellow fields and blue sky. Traditionally associated with peace and childhood, the idyllic scenery is rendered in luminous stained glass, while the figure appears as a dark rupture within the landscape -a threat embedded in the image itself.

The work is rooted in a childhood memory from western Georgia. As a child, Apakidze traveled with his mother across the unofficial boundary into Abkhazia to help friends harvest hazelnuts. Following the armed conflict of the early 1990s, the region has remained outside Georgian state control and under Russian military occupation, and crossing the boundary without authorization was illegal for Georgian citizens and carried significant risk. On their return, masked armed men stopped the car, took the harvest and their money, and struck the window with a gun. The glass did not break, but the experience of being a child inside a vehicle confronted by anonymous violence remained etched in his memory.

Years later, encountering images of families fleeing war zones, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine, Apakidze returned to this memory, reflecting on children inside cars looking out at soldiers, checkpoints, and guns. The car door becomes both shield and witness -a fragile membrane separating safety from danger.

Stained glass, traditionally used in churches to depict sacred narratives, transforms this personal memory into a devotional image. The landscape becomes a secular icon.

Throughout the installation, the hazelnut appears as a recurring symbol. Referencing Julian of Norwich’s vision of the world held “like a hazelnut,” it signifies life, childhood, and vulnerability. Set in quiet opposition to the rifle, it suggests a small, sacred world confronted by militarized power.

Bringing together the car door, the armed figure, the pastoral field, and the hazelnut, the work reflects on borders, displacement, and the fragile architecture of protection, considering how memory transforms ordinary objects into relics.

David Apakidze (b. 1998, Poti) is a visual artist, curator, and art historian. He is the co-founder of the Fungus Project and Fungus Gallery, queer art initiatives based in the Caucasus.

He studied Art History at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, where his focus on medieval Orthodox art continues to inform his practice. Working across sculpture, embroidery, printmaking, and stained glass, Apakidze reinterprets Georgian Orthodox iconography through a queer lens. His research-based practice explores questions of identity, tradition, and queerness within contemporary culture.

As the 2025 KVOST scholarship recipient and laureate of the Claus Michaletz Prize, Apakidze presented his solo exhibition at KVOST (Berlin) as part of the Featured section of Berlin Art Week. He has also participated in residencies and group exhibitions both locally and internationally, including Lerblabor (Berlin, 2021), Open Out Festival (Tromsø, 2023), Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw, 2024), and MeetFactory (Prague, 2025), Gallery Bukia Vakhania (Tbilisi, 2024-26). Apakidze’s installation "The Last Basilica" will be presented at Biennale Matter of Art (Prague, 2026).