Photographic Vertigo

How can photography reveal something that has always existed but remained unknown? These and many other questions occupy Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili in her artistic practice, which explores the elusive nature of photography.

By combining experimental analog techniques with digital tools, Alexi-Meskhishvili creates controlled environments that guide her artistically but ultimately leave room for chance in her imaging processes.

In this conversation, Alexi-Meskhishvili speaks with curator Carina Bukuts about the questioning of authorship, the darkroom as stage and studio, and the concept of personal and collective memory in the context of the artist’s Georgian roots and the country’s Soviet history —themes also addressed in her exhibition “Georgia,” which opens at Galerie Molitor as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin.

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili (born 1979 in Tbilisi) is a Georgian-American photographer based in Berlin. She stages her compositions in her studio or directly on the surface of an analog film emulsion—a kind of “camera-free” method. This results in images in which the remaining details of this deliberately improvised production shape the subject. Alexi-Meskhishvili explores the fluid boundaries between life and art, merging the grotesque, the poetic, the political, the humorous, and the uncanny into an ambivalent unity.

Solo exhibitions have taken place, among others, at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2026, planned), the Kunstverein Braunschweig (2025), at Je Vous Propose, Zurich (2024), at LC Quiesser, Tbilisi (2024), at backwall in the Kunsthalle Basel (2023), at Helena Anrather, New York (2023), and at Galerie Molitor, Berlin (2022). Selected group exhibitions include the Kunstmeile Hamburg (2025), the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London (2025), the CCA Berlin (2024), and the SculptureCenter, New York (2024).

Carina Bukuts is Chief Curator at the Kunsthalle Wien. From 2022 to 2025, she co-curated the Galerie Portikus in Frankfurt with Liberty Adrien. There, she curated highly acclaimed solo exhibitions by Hassan Khan (2025), Adrian Piper (2024), Tarik Kiswanson (2024), Simone Fattal (2023), Lap-See Lam (2023), and Asad Raza (2022), as well as group exhibitions featuring works by Jason Dodge, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Laurie Parsons, Luiz Roque, Slavs and Tatars, Sung Tieu, and Cecilia Vicuña, among others. Previously, she was an editor at frieze and founded PASSE-AVANT, an online platform for contemporary art and discourse.

She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and publishes regularly in various monographs and magazines, including frieze, Mousse Magazine, and Spike Art Magazine. In addition, she has taught at institutions such as the Städelschule, Goethe University Frankfurt, the Mainz Academy of Fine Arts, and the Braunschweig University of the Arts.

IN ENGLISH

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