Material Futures

With Pablo Larios

Pablo Larios is an author, critic, and International Editor at Artforum. He has written widely on contemporary art and visual culture and is the commissioning editor of Artforum’s November 2025 feature section on the future of photography, which includes contributions by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Christian Scheidemann, Thomas Demand, Florian Ebner, Roxana Marcoci, and Jeff Wall, amongst others.

Born in Honduras and raised in the United States, he lives in Berlin.

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he lives and works. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide over the past forty years.

His pictures often depict events the artist has witnessed and reconstructed in a process he calls ‘cinematography’. His subject matter ranges from everyday occurrences photographed in real places to imaginary situations constructed in a studio.

Jeff Wall is considered to be one of the artists who, since the 1970s, has led the way in emphasizing the affinities between photography, painting, and cinema. He taught art in universities in Canada for twenty-five years, and his critical writing has been collected and published in several languages.

His work has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, most recently at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland in 2021, the Beyeler Foundation, Basel in 2024, and the Museum for Art and Technology, Lisbon in 2025.

Jeff Wall © Andrew Querner

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili © Ana Tsitsishvili

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili is a photographer based in Berlin.

Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, her hybrid practice moves fluidly between analog and digital processes, combining constructed and incidental imagery, merging chance and intention in gestures that test the photograph’s limits as both image and object.

Her solo exhibitions include Making Food out of Sunlight, Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2025), Mirroring (with Gogi Alexi-Meskhishvili), LC Queisser, Tbilisi (2025), 24 Flags, Kunstmeile Hamburg (2025), there,but not, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2025), Flush, Galerie Molitor, Berlin (2022), Verkleidung, back wall project, Kunsthalle Basel ( 2022), Georgian Ornament, Rencontres d'Arles, Arles (2021) and mother, feelings, cognac, galerie frank elbaz, Paris (2019).

Florian Ebner

Florian Ebner is Head of the Photography Department at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Previously, he directed the Photography Collection at Museum Folkwang in Essen and curated the German Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).

His curatorial work examines the social and political dimensions of photography, highlighting the medium’s role within contemporary visual culture.

Recent exhibitions include Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing Could Have Prepared Us—Everything Could Have Prepared Us (Centre Pompidou, 2025).

Born in Regensburg, he lives and works in Paris.

Florian Ebner, 2024 © Wolfgang Tillmans