Akhmat Bikanov is an artist from Kabardino-Balkaria, a graduate of the Moscow Art Institute (2020).  Akhmat’s solo exhibitions were held in Moscow and Berlin, he participated in group shows in Turkey and Germany (“As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories”, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), “A Bit of Unruly Complexity”, SANATORIUM Gallery). Based in Berlin.  

Ahmat works primarily with watercolour, in which he appreciates the ability to see the errors behind the layers of translucent solution that allow the colour to become more expressive. However, this process requires time for each previous layer to dry before applying the next. For the artist, his practice is above all a ritual, where it is important not to be afraid and to appreciate mistakes, to learn to release control and accept the mismatch between the original idea and the eventual realisation. The tone of watercolour helps to fill in the lack of brightness and contrast in reality or to revive memories that lose strength and intensity as time passes.

  Akhmat’s statement is based on a personal memory associated with his childhood in Kabardino-Balkaria. Field trips with his family or his mother’s colleagues, members of the National Dance and Music Ensemble; moments of rest surrounded by mountains and more often solitary portraits — all these are patterns of elusive memories of the past turned into fantasies of the future. The artist’s working method reflects the properties of human memory in many ways: preparatory graphic sketches are more precise than watercolours, where details give way to colour solutions that convey a whole image. What the artist remembers blurs with the passage of time, leaving plumes of sensations from the experience and forming images of memory. 

The space of Bikanov’s works, although reminiscent of the Caucasus, at the same time becomes a fictional landscape of a place where people are united by common values. It is a shelter in which there is no judgement or coercion, a place free from all that is superficial and biassed, where everyone is able to be themselves in the company of loved ones and family, where there is intimacy but at the same time there is a room for detachment and solitude. Akhmat creates a space of personal mythology that can embrace his own memories, transformed while seeking and building up a world where there is a place of peace and freedom.