Ana Mikadze: Accumulation(s)

What do you do when you inherit absence? When that absence is visceral, undeniable—yet refuses to take form?

In Accumulation(s), Ana Mikadze traces what they call technologies of survival: the residues of familial memory, legible only through their erasure. This is not a search for what endures,but an inquiry into the fragments gathered when memory must be reassembled rather than received.

Mikadze’s grandfather, the son of genocide survivors, inherited no photographs, documents, or verifiable lineage. His response was to hoard. Objects accumulated in his home not according to use, value or sentiment, but as a form of compensatory archaeology —an urgent, almost desperate proof that something had once existed. This compulsion now structures Mikadze’s own practice. They too, accumulate objects, materials, narrative fragments, family lore, ephemera, images whose significance remains latent or incomplete. Here, hoarding functions not as dysfunction but as method: a mode of worldbuilding that tries to reanimate severed connections.

The grandmother recurs throughout as a material collaborator. Her mother—Ana’s great-grandmother—practiced ceramics and sericulture, raising silkworms within a centuries-old tradition of collective silk production embedded in Caucasian craft economies. None of it survives. Yet, decades later, Mikadze’s own work in ceramics and silk unexpectedly restored access to ancestral rhythms and gestures. After their grandfather’s passing, teaching ceramics to their grandmother became a shared process of memory and reconstruction. Through this collaboration, forgotten gestures, textures, and long forgotten forms began to reemerge.

They linger not in a search for authenticity, but in the uncertain space where memory is actively made— through mistranslation, distortion, repetition, interpretation and the insistence of touch. The works dwell in compromised times, where memory is always already contaminated by its conditions of transmission.

The exhibition unfolds across these affective and material inheritances, moving between personal narrative and larger historical entanglements. The Accumulation(s) series offers a poetics of debris. It is an offering not to the past as it was, but to the impossibility of its retrieval, an offering of the irrecoverable, articulated through the material vocabularies that were never passed down.

The exhibition is a collaboration between QMA and kuntsverein Weiglgasse.

Ana Mikadze (b. 2002) is a Vienna-based Georgian designer, artist, and art researcher of Armenian descent whose practice mainly addresses material and infrastructural legacies of imperialism in the Caucasus, as well as extractivism, labor, and borderization processes through historical and geopolitical lenses. With a background in industrial design from Design Academy Eindhoven and currently a student at University of Applied Arts Vienna, their work spans installations, research, and material inquiry. Recent recognitions include a 2025 S+T+ARTS Prize Honorary Mention, an exhibition at WIEN MUSEUM “Zwischen Pick-up & Drop-off” (2025), Vienna Design Week (2024), and WIENWOCHE Festival for Art & Activism (2024). Notable projects include “Energy as a Tool of Hybrid Warfare” (2022), which examined cryptocurrency mining’s neocolonial implications in Georgia and “The Energy Atlas” (2022), a joint research publication on energy infrastructures exhibited at Het Nieuwe Instituut’s “The Energy Show.”