Kubra Aliyeva

Kubra Aliyeva (b. 1989; Baku, Azerbaijan) is an Azerbaijani artist based in London, currently studying at the Royal College of Art. Working across installation, sculpture, painting, and printmaking, her practice explores the female body as a site of memory and labour through tactile processes of repetition, layering, and repair.

About

Kubra Aliyeva is drawn to materials that carry their own tactility and vulnerability, using them to develop a practice grounded in repetition, layering, and repair. Working slowly and by hand—accumulating, stitching, binding, reworking, and mending—she treats these gestures as both process and language. Repetition becomes a way of holding time; layering gathers what has been carried; repair is not a correction but a visible record of endurance, care, and continuation. Through this material vocabulary, her work speaks to forms of labour that are frequently overlooked, and to the quiet resilience required to sustain memory over time.

Rather than presenting remembrance as a fixed or linear narrative, Kubra Aliyeva approaches memory as something physical—handled, reworked, and preserved through touch. Her installations create sensorial environments in which viewers encounter memory through the body. Suspended forms, traces, and textured surfaces invite proximity and attentiveness, allowing meaning to emerge through presence rather than explanation.

In recent work, Aliyeva reclaims camouflage as a feminist strategy of visibility. Shifting it from concealment to assertion, she exposes what has been trained to disappear and insists on the right to be seen—making present what is often expected to remain quiet or unseen.


Exhibitions

Education

Royal College of Art RCA, Graduate Diploma in Art & Design, 2025 - 2026 (London, UK)

City & Guilds of London Art School, Foundation, 2024 (London, UK)


Gesture of Memories, Meso Ventures, 2026 (New Delhi, India)

Between Worlds, Meso Ventures, The HiLight, 2025 (London, UK)

Royal Academy of Arts, Summer Exhibition, 2025 (London, UK)

Milan Art Fair, 2024 (Milan, Italy)

Ruth Borchard Collection, Self Portrait Prize exhibition, 2023 (London, UK)

New English Art Club, Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, 2021 (London, UK)

Select Group & Solo Exhibitions