David Meskhi

David Meskhi is a photographer based in Berlin, Germany. He was born in 1979 in Tbilisi, Georgia.^[1] After gaining a master's degree in Hydro ecology, Meskhi decided to change his profession entirely and turned to art. He received an Academic Degree in Photo Journalism at Shota Rustaveli Theatre and Film State University, Tbilisi, Georgia.^[2] Since picking up a camera, he says his life hasn't been the same - photography provided him with what he'd been searching for - something that music, ecology and directing had failed to do. His main objective is to make the viewer feel what he feels and create a world in which he can interact with other people, no matter what language they speak or where they're from.^[3]

In 2008 Meskhi was invited to photograph the Georgian Olympic Team.^[4]

Style and Passion

Photography is his means for sharing emotional experiences, so the majority of his photographs are of people, new places, unusual lighting and altogether extraordinary moments. Since 2004, Meskhi has been working as a photographer and photojournalist for several magazines, and his artworks have been exhibited in Georgia, Germany, France, Austria, Israel, Russia and the UK. In 2013-2015 he co-directed a documentary “When the Earth Seems to be Light”^{[5][6][7][8][9]} with Salome Machaidze and Tamuna Karumidze, which is based on his photographs. Meskhi only considers a photograph successful if the viewer becomes a co-participant in that moment. Artist’s camera is always seeking for signs of life. The artworks reflect how photography becomes the instrument to idealize the existence and underline the means for sharing emotional experiences.^[10] Most of Meskhi’s works show concealed layers of adolescent. The artist gets his inspiration from kids and he looks into their own forms of expression. Visually the artworks begin their existence as a set of photographic images, which break the boundaries of time. Meskhi captures young people whose bodies defy the law of gravitation.^[11]

As art has become less definable by medium, photographers have tended to remain the most genre-specific of practitioners. Perhaps this has to with the medium’s commonality and a consequent need for an artist to define a recognizably coherent subjectivity. Recently, younger photographers, such as David Meskhi, have been actively disregarding such constraints. His exhibition “Higher” consisted of analog photographs taken in his native country of Georgia since 2007.^[12] Many show a gang of teenage skateboarders on a promenade backed by a pale strip of cerulean sea. The mode of display, like the style of the photographs, varied radically. Slick high-definition color prints were taped directly to the wall; others were framed. There were shabby black-and-white images, dissolving in their own grain, like pictures cut out of an old newspaper. Similarly, the hanging was self-consciously haphazard, uneven, whimsical.^[13]

Meskhi offers scenes like boys swigging liquor in a graffitied basement (an untitled work from 2008) or communing in a dark field (New Year’s, 2009). The intimacy of the images suggests that they belong to a visual diary put together by one of the gang. And yet Meskhi, in his early 30s, would seem too old to belong to this milieu. The work also conveys something of a fashion shoot’s glamour—aided both by a technical similarity to fashion photographers’ recent use of analog point-and-shoot cameras, and by the boys’ skinny jeans and trendily disheveled hair. However, it is less the currency of stylish spectacle than the datedness of nostalgia, the fragility of memory, that accounts for the emotiveness of the pictures.^[14] Meskhi pursues existentialist ideology in his artworks. His photos represent Meskhi as a photographer and as an individual. Quiet sadness and melancholy oppose optimistic, vivid characters full of joy of life. These characters express idealism and at the same time reflect the feeling of sorrow. This is perhaps the bottom-line of the message the photographer tries to pass on.^[15]

Exhibitions

Since 2004 David Meskhi has been working as a photographer and photojournalist for several magazines. In 2011, artist’s solo exhibitions were held: in Austria (Eternal Distance, Anika Handelt Galerie) and Germany (Higher, Galerie Micky Schubert). Meskhi participated in group exhibitions such as: 2014 PhotoVisa-VI, International Festival of Photography, Krasnodar, Russia; 2013 Photo Festival of Arles, La Nuit de l’Année, Arles, France; Tbilisi Photography Festival, Tbilisi, Georgia; 2012 Ich Ist Ein Anderer, Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany; 2011 Sunny Side Up, Margate Photo Festival, UK; Explications 1.2, Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia; IMAGO, Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany; Face to Face, Pobeda Gallery, Moscow, Russia; 2009 I Want a Print, Tel-Aviv, Israel and others.^[16][17]

References