Blurry Middle Distance | ბუნდოვანი შუა მანძილი. Performance by Keta Gavasheli

The performance Blurry Middle Distance | ბუნდოვანი შუა მანძილი unfolds artist and sound performer Keta Gavasheli’s (*1990, Tbilisi, Georgia) most recent filmic work shot in Tbilisi, Düsseldorf and New York. Drawing from neuroscience as well as poetry, Gavasheli explores the role of memory in molding our perceptions of the present. Amidst growing political tensions in her homeland Georgia, the artist addresses through the camera lens notions of alienation, loss, but also collectiveness, in an attempt at reconnecting with a landscape scarred with urban and social transformations. Incorporating text and spoken word, her multimedia work traces analogies across language, body and space, using the recurring image of the hole as a point of departure from which personal and collective stories emerge. 

Keta Gavasheli lives and works in Düsseldorf. Anchored in a co-creative process, her live performance involves sonic contributions by peer artists and friends Zurab Babunashvili, binbadweather, DECHA, John T. Gast, Yvette Georges, MINALOY, and Sandro Tediashvili, fostering a plural and dialectical approach to artmaking.

Text by Isabelle Tondre

Keta Gavasheli is a Tbilisi-born, Düsseldorf-based multidisciplinary artist whose work moves across sound-based media, moving image, installation, and performance. Before her graduation in Fine Arts in 2024 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she was a Meisterschülerin in the class of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Gavasheli studied architecture at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Often using methods of collage by assembling and gathering disparate and found elements, she explores the fragmented nature of memory and the residual, unstable quality that language has in mnemonic processes. Involving time-based media such as sound, poetry and performance, her work further reflects on the permeability and porosity of spatial and psychic boundaries.

As a resident at Salon des Amateurs, a venue for experimental and club music founded in Düsseldorf in 2004, she has been actively involved in the space’s programming over the past two years and regularly performs and curates events. In her live performances which include music as well as spoken word, physical presence is explored as a mode of socio-political resistance. Her sets drift across genres without holding to any one in particular, moving through murky soundworlds shaped by UK bass, experimental rap, industrial grime, dub mutations and sounds like heavy, noisy textures, with fragments of oppressed voices.