As featured on Fantom 02 / Winter 2010

As a child, Alexi-Meskhishvili would dismantle every toy that was given to her. Nowadays, she is still doing the same thing – but images have replaced the toys.
“The tension between what is revealed and what is obstructed is an inherent puzzle of photography which I try to amplify,” she writes. “I see faces in everything I look at.” In flat Death, a term coined by Roland Barthes, Alexi-Meskhishvili’s work embodies the way photographs present their viewers with a form of visual death: a moment forever lost to the past. Yet, through a process she describes as “half conception, half instinct”, those moments are reclaimed by a combination of her skilled manipulation of the medium and chance.

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia and studied photography at Bard College in New York. She has exhibited in galleries internationally, and contributed to publications such as Bidoun and Capricious magazine. She currently lives in Berlin and runs a weekly photo blog called L’Art J’aime Pas