Kubra Aliyeva

Kubra Aliyeva is an Azerbaijani artist based in London, currently studying at the Royal College of Art. Working across installation, sculpture, painting, and printmaking, her practice centres on the female body as a site of memory, labour, and transformation. Using materials that carry their own tactility and vulnerability, Aliyeva foregrounds processes of repetition, layering, and repair. These gestures echo forms of invisible labour traditionally carried by women, as well as the quiet resilience required to sustain both personal and collective memory. Her installations create sensorial environments in which memory is not presented as linear narrative, but experienced through the body—felt, worked, and held—anchored in traditions that continue to evolve.

This installation reclaims camouflage as a feminist act of visibility rather than concealment. The suspended forms are deliberately exposed, held in place by chains that reference both control and support. Instead of blending in, the work insists on presence, challenging the expectation that bodies, particularly female bodies, must adapt by disappearing. Here, camouflage becomes a strategy of resistance: making what has been trained to hide unapologetically seen.