“Photography is a game of presence and ab sence—a delicate equilibrium between what’s captured and what can’t be seen. It’s defined as much by what’s left out of the image as by what you see.”
This is how Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili (*1979 in Tbilisi) describes her approach to photography, as a medium that runs throughout her entire body of work. Her interest is not only in the photographic image itself, however, but also in the mechanisms that help bring it into being. The artist, who grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia and moved to New York with her family as a teenag er, works with both analogue and digital tech nologies, reproducing images in small formats or transforming entire spaces with them. Her photographs fluctuate between translucency and opacity, their surfaces marked by scratches and the traces of manual interventions. While they display an interest in classical genres like the stilllife, the artist also focuses on seemingly worthless everyday objects, giving her works both a documentary and a personal quality. While she stages the medium of photography in manifold ways, her works all show an enduring interest in the question of to what extent pho tography is capable of depicting reality.
This question also runs throughout the ex hibition there, but not, which was specially con ceived to accompany the classical architecture of the Villa Salve Hospes. In the Spiegelsaal, the artist presents Swan Veil (2025), a textile piece that hangs behind the chandelier at the center of the room and spans the space diago nally. The lightweight, translucent fabric is printed with images of swans—a motif the artist dis covered on a serviette in Tbilisi and subse quently manipulated using various different techniques. The original design was first scanned, then digitally reworked, before being printed out as transparencies that were then laid over strips of unexposed camera film.
The multiplication of the printed motif on the cotton fabric produces a pattern that stands in tension with the hall’s decorative elements. An adjoining ovalshaped room contains another of these “veils,” as the artist calls her largescale textile works: The installation flooding the zone (2025) is a “space within a space,” with the artist converting the room’s floor plan into a sort of metal skeleton that serves as the support for the fabric. Its motif was again taken from a Georgian serviette and features roses—like the swans, a generic, massproduced image that has no direct relationship to Georgia. The artist connects it with her experience of the image politics of the Soviet Union, however, in which “flowers were the only motif—beyond portraits of Stalin or Lenin—that had a right to exist, without carrying any higher political meaning. They also have a certain brazenness that I see expressed in kitschy objects.” By appropriating, reproducing, and staging these flat, mass-pro duced symbols in architectural space, the artist lends these images a new conceptual depth.
Alexi-Meskhishvili is particularly interested in the way her textile works float between pho tography and object, without falling clearly into either category; while they have an imposing physical presence, their aesthetic and use of materials also lends them a light and transpar ent quality. The swan and flower motifs were chosen as a deliberate reference to the gardens surrounding the villa and can also be read as an amusing comment on its past as a stately private residence. The adjoining Gartensaal also houses the largeformat work making food out of sunlight (twilight), which features a tulip. The work resembles an Xray and presents the flower as a ghostly impression. It is the result of a complex production process that is exemplary of the artist’s practice: Instead of using a cam era, she instead laid the flower directly onto unexposed film strips in the darkness of herstudio, whose only source of light was a small lamp in her hand. The developed negative was then scanned and printed, with the prints pro duced using a digital technique that uses heat to bond pigments to an aluminum surface, fusing the image and its support.
While the tulip was considered to be a neutral motif in the Soviet era, it has played a crucial role as a political symbol in Georgia’s more recent history. On April 9, 1989, a peaceful antiSoviet demonstration in Tbilisi was violently broken up by Soviet special forces, triggered by the auton omous Abkhazia region’s attempted withdrawal from the Soviet Union. Thirty people died during the confrontation, with hundreds injured or poi soned with tear gas. Protests for Georgia’s inde pendence reached their highpoint around this time, marked by an ongoing resistance to Soviet domination. In spite of the danger, just a few hours after the tragedy countless mourners gathered in Rustaveli Avenue, which was soon strewn with tulips. These events led to profound changes: a referendum held on March 31, 1991, saw a majority vote for independence, which was officially declared exactly two years to the day after the massacre, on April 9, 1991. mak ing food out of sunlight (twilight) and flooding the zone demonstrate how the symbolic power of incidental, everyday objects can change according to their context.
On the upper floor, the artist presents works that respond to or contrast with the simple design of the exhibition space. Corset (2025) is a dis play that has been adapted to the floor plan of the space, and whose light green color—a shade somewhere between mint and pistachio —exudes a striking presence within the archi tecture of the exhibition. The metal structure has been furnished with analogue photographs from the artist’s archive, which are attached using small magnets. Many of the works bear not one date but three, referencing the years
a collage’s individual elements were originally produced. Iveria/Taylor (2001/2006/2009) began in 2001 with a photo of the tower of the formerly staterun Iveria Hotel, which was built in the center of Tbilisi in 1967 and quickly became a symbol of modernist architecture in Georgia. When the fall of the Soviet Union brought the conflict in the Autonomous Republic of Abkhazia to a head, the building was converted into emer gency accommodation for displaced people. It has been overlaid with a triangular cutout of a photograph of a model named Taylor, who Alexi- Meskhishvili met in 2006 during a commission in New York. The current version of the work was produced sixteen years ago, in 2009. While the other works in the exhibition draw on more complex technical processes, the Corset series sees the artist return to one of the medium’s oldest forms—analogue photography—enabling her to make manual interventions while con sciously allowing for mistakes. The display recalls the situation in a dark room, where de veloped photos are hung up to dry or laid out alongside one another in order to compare different exposure times.
From this room, visitors also catch a glimpse of Ojeeee Ojaaaa (1993/2023/2025), a film spanning three timelines that was specially produced for the exhibition. It begins with a scene from the artist’s thirteenth birthday – the last such anniversary she spent in Georgia be fore the family emigrated to the USA. This is followed by shots of the Aragveli metro station in the Georgian capital, whose glass facade Alexi-Meskhishvili designed for her 2023 work Georgian Ornament. Her design was based on plastic bags printed with ornamental patterns, which she found in tourist shops. The artist’s interest here is in the moment in which images without any clear authorship are used to forge
a new identity—what she describes as an “ex- oticizing selfimage.” The following sequence features shots taken in central Tbilisi over Christmas 2024. We see the countless lights
of the Christmas decorations on the one hand, while on the other public transit signs and stations bear visible traces of the largescale protests. We also see large gatherings of people, which could be read as celebratory in this con text. The Georgian population has been protest ing the suspension of EU accession talks since late 2024, with the opposition demanding new elections and accusing the government of elec toral manipulation. The administration responded with arrests, blaming the unrest on external forces, while the opposition criticizes its authoritarian course and increasingly close ties to Russia. The film ends with shots taken this winter, show ing the artist’s now thirteenyearold daughter playing Nintendo during a trip to Georgia.
As the title indicates, there, but not is a con stant interplay between presence and absence —of places, objects, and political events. By overlaying different photographic technologies and eras, and through her subjects’ oscillation between the trivial and the complex, the artist’s work is imbued with a resistance against fixed or unambiguous categorizations. This unyielding urge to repeatedly create new contexts in and for her work reflects Alexi-Meskhishvili’s acute gift for observing the fragile nature of both our present and its representation.
A second tulip appears in the last room of the exhibition under the title making food out of sunlight (dawn), thus forming the counterpart
to the almost identically named work on display on the ground floor. It hangs opposite A Life’s Work, a small selfportrait featuring mirrors strewn with Legobrick roses. The artist herself offers the following description of the work: “This work is not about me as a person, but rather an experiment in incorporating a figure into a still life. Since I rarely depict people in my work, my own image serves as the means for exploring this genre. At the same time, it’s proof of my existence—here and now.”
Cathrin Mayer
