Mano Svanidze

“I have been taking photos since 2009. I always dreamt of painting and wouldn't dare. I was afraid of disappointment, that I would ruin my hopes and as a result, there would be no painter and no dream. So I decided to keep it as a dream.

Once, when I was browsing the Internet, I discovered Bill Brandt. Someone wrote that he was a "second painter" and at that time I felt that I wanted to paint with light, to be a "second painter". So I started taking photos and now photography is a very important part of my life. It's not my profession, but it's more than a hobby. I know that I want to do this until the end of my life. 

Why film.. because I like film texture, its colours.. film is something special.. something precious for me. You have only 36 shots, you are limited, but it makes you more careful, more sensitive. Shots are not more than feelings. When I take digital photos, I have unlimited shots, and distributing this feeling in an unlimited space makes me scared - that what I feel during shooting will disperse and disappear.” 

As part of the exhibition, we’ll be showing photos from Mano’s series “Back” and “Song for Grandma”. These two moving collections of images of her grandma are a very personal reportage, which at the same time evokes questions of female identity and depictions of age. You can find more of Mano’s images on her Facebook page, Flickr, and Graf.Ge. 

Mariya Kozhanova

 

"I like to work with photography. I love the way how it reflects the world. And I love how it singles out the main essence. Because the most important thing is not what is there, it matters what you are looking at and what you are seeing."

Mariya Kozhanova was born in 1986 in Kaliningrad, Russia. She started with photography classes at the Kaliningrad Union of Photographers, studying analogue camera techniques. 

Her exhibitions include Entropy 9 (2008) in the German-Russian House in Kaliningrad; Under the Glass (2009), a group exhibition of contemporary Russian photography held at Selena Gallery, Long Island University, New York; and I Look at the Window (2010) at Galerie Axel Obiger in Berlin.

Mariya participated in the Houston FotoFest (2012) and Bratislava Month of Photography (2012) with a group exhibition of the Young Generation of Russian Photography. In the year 2013, she was presented with a special project during the 5th Foto Exhibition in Seoul, South Korea. She is a first prize winner of Fotomania 2011, the Baltic Biennale of Photography. Her works were published in several Russian regional magazines and in SHOTS magazine in Minneapolis.

“I like to show the fragility and hidden beauty in our world. I am catching something that surrounds us every day, but needs to be carefully discovered.”

 Mariya has also participated in the photoboite project, 30 UNDER 30 Women Photographers, a project dedicating to promoting female photographers under 30. 

 You can contact Mariya on info@mariyakozhanova.com

Hanan Kazma

In her work, Hanan, a photographer living in Lebanon, explores the ideas of self and tries to re-examine the classic idea of portraiture, using a range of in-camera and post-production techniques. Often working as her own model, she experiments with how to represent the inner factors that make up our image rather than the image we project from the outside. 

Hanan is a very prolific artist and so far she has designed and published six books: “A Little Out of Tenderness” (2010), “Things I heard the light say” (2010), “In Solitude and Out of Control” (2011), “Unlike Things Must Meet” (2011, in collaboration with an American collage artist and poet Richard Leach), “Hacyka” (2012, in collaboration with a Belgian-based artist and photographer Cyril Berthault-Jacquier), and “A Brave Unbodied Scheme” (2013, in collaboration with Richard Leach). 

In 2011, Hanan had her first solo exhibition in Tripoli, Lebanon. 

We will be exhibiting a selection of Hanan’s self-portraits that we hope will show the variety of techniques and styles that she uses to construct a diverse concept of identity and to convey her stories. You can see more of Hanan's work on her page and find some of the books that she's published on her blurb page.