Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili: Shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2021: On view at Capitain Petzel & Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles

What made me love photography was its boundary problems: how the ambiguous power of decisions such as composition, editing, framing, circulation and presentation of an image tends to determine the meaning more than that which is being depicted. Or, for example, the opaqueness of boundaries between the depicted and depicter that are easily blurred by the dynamics of power. These tendencies allow photography a vast, mysterious area for an artist to investigate and play in. 

—Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Objektiv #20, 2020

The extensive visual media consumption that forms a large part of contemporary life often also results in the dissolving of mental boundaries, as images amalgamate in our minds and bleed into one another. This disorientation is reflected in photographic works such as patterns of an unstable frame and Heinrich-Heine Straße in which images merge, forming assemblages with unclear borders. Alexi-Meskhishvili’s compositions subtly weave together analog and digital photographic practices: in patterns of an unstable frame, the hazy imagery is the product of the artist capturing the image through a semi-sheer barrier of textile, while the visuals of Heinrich Heine Straße are superimposed and collaged digitally in Photoshop. The medial-material aspects are foregrounded through retaining of the edges of the negatives in the final print, complete with the laboratory perforation, which in pattern of an unstable frame has additionally been supplemented in digital post-processing with another silver, kitschy-looking frame.