Melina Katsiri

Melina Katsiri is a visual artist and filmmaker born to a Greek family in Frankfurt am Main, where she lives and works. Her work stays close to home: the migrant histories of the Bahnhofsviertel, a family archive of childhood photographs, the bodies of close friends. It asks how much of what is close an image can hold, and what it hides or loses.

The answer lies in how her images are made. She shoots on 16mm and develops the film by hand, sometimes in coffee, so that chemistry, time and touch determine what surfaces. In her installations, family photographs are transferred onto lithographic stones: surfaces made to endure, and made to be erased. And she photographs friends with a Game Boy Camera, whose few pixels hold the body back and, in doing so, let intimacy in. Through these processes, she traces the struggles of growing up in marginalised high-rise estates, the fine line between intimacy and exposure, and the illusion of memory’s permanence.