Biography

Jana Romanova (b. 1984) is a photographer, based in Saint-Petersburg. She got a degree in journalism from Saint-Petersburg State University and currently she works with photography, video and installations to investigate the theme of collective identities in Russia and former Soviet Union countries. As a photographer she challenges herself with experiments, where she becomes a part of different communtites, questions her own identity and explores the medium of photography and how it works as a tool of power through classification, systematisation and falsification, being something that is “created” by any community.
Her long-term documentary projects were selected for a number of international exhibitions and festivals such as Encontros da Imagem (Braga, Portugal), the Backlight Festival (Tampere, Finland), Encuentros Abietros Festival (Buenos Aires, Argentina) «Perchance to Dream» at Andrea Meislin Gallery (New York, USA), “New Saint-Petersburg” at Nieuw Dakota Gallery (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), , “Me, myself and I” by Anzenberger Gallery (Vienna, Austria), etc. and got several prizes and honorable mentions in pho-tography all over the world.

What does it mean to be Welsh? If you want to integrate into the Welsh community, what should you wear, and how do you need to behave to be accepted?

These are some of the questions posed by Russian artist Jana Romanova in this body of work Adopted Welsh.

Developed as part of a Ffotogallery residency in 2015 within the European Prospects international programme, Romanova crowd sourced ideas, calling out to people across Wales with the question “If I was to become Welsh, what would my future here look like?”

Travelling across Wales, she did exactly what people suggested she should do – sing in a choir, play and watch rugby, join a historical re-enactment society, become a local schoolteacher.

Young Russian couples, inhabitants of Saint-Petersburg and Moscow, are sleeping in their bedrooms early in the morning, the time when people don’t really care about their appearance, being natural. They are preparing to become parents in a few months, and the project investigates not only their attitude to each other during the period of expecting a baby, but also the way young families live in big cities of modern Russia, 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the country that will be known to their children only from history books.

The project consists of 40 images, like 40 weeks in pregnancy.

In March 2014 the tension between Russia and Ukraine started to grow high, inspired by the informational war on the situation in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Common people started to loose the desire to understand each other. Being Russian photographer, Romanova asked different people who took part in the revolution in Kiev at the Square of Independence, to remember words which are absolutely the same both in Russian and Ukrainian languages and illustrate these words for the photographs - to make a sort of collective ABC, based on the idea that understanding starts from the language, and language starts from the alphabet.

Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 01

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Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 07

Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 12

Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 14

Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 18

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Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 27

Romanova Jana Alphabet Of Shared Words 29

Shvilishvili is Georgian for “grandchild”, literally it could be translated as a child of a child. In this project, presented as book-object, the author questions the value of family photography and family ties themselfs in modern society through an attempt to unite her relatives from one blood line by photography. The family is divided between two countries - Russia and Georgia, - and the problems of it’s members on both sides of the border arise from the post-war political situation as well as the tragic story of a murder committed inside the family.

The shape of the book is unhandy and questions the necessity of a family album in modern society, being an anti - family album itself.