Teona Kokhodze's False Awakening Series Distorts Familiar Objects Through Photography

Teona Kokhodze's photographic collection, False Awakening, delves into the unsettling moments when reality seems questionable, utilizing bottles, boxes, hands, and material fragments. This series illustrates the concept of false awakening, where the familiar is rendered unrecognizable. Kokhodze's still lifes, echoing the style of Giorgio Morandi, exhibit a loss of stability, with shadows taking on a life of their own. Techniques such as overlays and double exposures produce ambiguous visuals, including two hands intersecting with multiple outlines and a bottle that appears both light and dark. While the series resonates with Surrealism, it bears closer resemblance to the works of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, questioning the certainty of images. The use of black and white photography highlights this instability, balancing recognizable features with an underlying tension of familiarity and disconnection.