Jana Romanova

An exhibition of Water Portraits selection at Prospects exhibition by Mondriaan Fonds during Art Rotterdam. In “Water Portraits” I ask people to reuse one liter of freshwater one after another until it’s gone. After each usage, I freeze the water and take its portrait. Each portrait gets the name of the person who used it, and a recipe for how the water was reused. After each liter is exhausted, I start a new one. One hundred and one participants took part in this project in 2021-2024. The longest chain of using one liter of water consists of 15 stages, and the shortest one consists of 1.

In “Water Portraits” I ask people to reuse one liter of freshwater one after another until it’s gone. After each usage, I freeze the water and take its portrait. Each portrait gets the name of the person who used it, and a recipe for how the water was reused. After each liter is exhausted, I start a new one. One hundred and one participants took part in this project in 2021-2024. The longest chain of using one liter of water consists of 15 stages, and the shortest one consists of 1.

Water Portraits. Masja. In “Water Portraits” I ask people to reuse one liter of freshwater one after another until it’s gone. After each usage, I freeze the water and take its portrait. Each portrait gets the name of the person who used it, and a recipe for how the water was reused. After each liter is exhausted, I start a new one. One hundred and one participants took part in this project in 2021-2024. The longest chain of using one liter of water consists of 15 stages, and the shortest one consists of 1.

Water Portraits installation at See Lab in The Hague created with a support of Stroom Den Haag. In “Water Portraits” I ask people to reuse one liter of freshwater one after another until it’s gone. After each usage, I freeze the water and take its portrait. Each portrait gets the name of the person who used it, and a recipe for how the water was reused. After each liter is exhausted, I start a new one. One hundred and one participants took part in this project in 2021-2024. The longest chain of using one liter of water consists of 15 stages, and the shortest one consists of 1.

“DreamHouse” is a 4-6 hours-long role-playing experience in which participants are invited to take roles of housemates living together in a speculative near future. In this future, AI assistants are big part of everyone’s life. A housing corporation “DreamHouse” has recently introduced a project where tenants' rent depends on how well they live as a community in a shared household. AI technology is there to help them maintain possible communication issues. And evaluating how well they perform it. The role-play is designed for 14 participants and includes a character-building workshop, a play, and a debrief. The play is created around several cycles of Nights and Days, during which the scene has different lighting. During the Day, participants interact with each other, trying to solve all sorts of communal and personal dilemmas, but also with AI voice assistant asking it for help or trying to avoid its attention.

The Last Submarine is a climate fiction role-play about water scarcity designed by artists Jana Romanova and Sophie Allerding. The story takes place in a speculative future in which sea levels have risen, the land is long gone and humans are living in floating cities. Fresh water is the most precious resource and has become the new currency. Participants play a submarine crew sent on a mission with the last resources to find a new source of fresh water and hopefully save the future of humanity. The play has both a dramatic and humorous tone, the playtime is 6 hours (variable) including a workshop, and debriefing, for 10-12 players.

“The Shimmering Land” role play takes its name and inspiration from the exhibition that features the artworks of Crimean artists Natalia Grezina and Anton Yermolov, who have been working alongside curator Marth von Loeben on a project about the lost heritage. The exhibition is currently on the show at Chrysalid Gallery and the play will take place in one of its rooms on the 25th and 26th of August. You can choose one or these dates to participate. During this short role playing game, participants will play roles of 7 objects from the collection of Scythian gold that inspired the exhibition. At the start of the game, objects awake while being transported inside a box in a vehicle. They don’t know their destination, yet as rare objects which belonged to Scythian kings and noble men and women, they have some ancient powers to influence their route. This event is an experimental way to discuss the notion of agency, heritage, and the sense of belonging through collective storytelling and co-creating an experience. The play is designed and facilitated by artist and play designer Jana Romanova in the conversation with Natalia Grezina, Anton Yermolov and Marth von Loeben.

A Dinner for Tired and Busy People is a dinner game organized by artists Jana Romanova and Anastasia Loginova on November 17th, 2022 at PIP nightclub for PIP Expo in The Hague. During this evening, several important questions circulating around why we are so busy and tired were posed in an effort to finally resolve them. As tired & busy people, participants were able to choose a question they can deeply relate to and share their experience with others who feel the same. By the end of the evening, the answer to their question was served to them in the form of a dish someone cooked for them, while they were cooking an answer to someone else’s question. This event was a dinner experience for 30 people organized as a part of the program of PIP Expo curated by Laura Snijders & Alex Webber with the generous support of PIP & Stroom Den Haag Documentation images by Helena Roig

“Where the Ink Starts” is a live-action role play (LARP) about artists’ relationships with their creativity in the situation of time and daily life pressure created by artists Jana Romanova and Johannes Equizi. The game begins with a group of writers squatting in their studio space and having to finish their script before a deadline set by Spark Press, a famous publishing house. To be published by Spark Press is the right chance for the writers to gain income and move out of the studio. The twist of this game lies in the fact that every writer is played by two people. A participant may become either a writer or a writer’s creativity. Both of them will need to find a way to work with each other to finish a written piece on time. By looking at creativity as a separate entity with its own will and mysteries, this game invites participants to reflect on how to deal with their own creativity and with fellow artists who are in a similar situation of daily life crisis. In many ways, this game is about finding peace with your own mind in the situation of pressure that every creative person goes through on a daily basis.

“Chin Up Chin Down” is a participatory performance, a game, that reflects upon the relationships between a photographer, the one being photographed, and a camera. Two people are giving each other multiple instructions — where to move, where to look, how to feel. Their communication is based on controlling each other in front of a camera and for the camera. This project exists in the form of video documentation of each game and its translation into a format of a booklet. “Chin Up Chin Down” looks into when and how do we become readable images and challenges the language of power.

https://janaromanova.com/images-i-can-t-show

"When I was a child, my parents often told me things like, “Girls don’t wear wrinkled clothes” or “Don’t climb trees, you’re a girl”. I never questioned these rules until I became an adult. Throughout my life, my relatives have told me that I’m not very feminine and that this is the reason for all of my problems. I have always engaged in arguments around this issue, but eventually decided to google how to become more feminine. I found a lot of courses in Russia offering practices that teach women special ways of interacting with the world: how to collect feminine energy, follow the moon calendar, «breathe» with your womb, find a goddess inside yourself and change reality around you. I started to visit femininity teachers to see if I could understand what femininity is and if it could help me. «When a woman becomes feminine she can get everything she needs only by thinking about it. Every woman can have this power. You can also have it if you want. The only thing you need is to accept who you are and learn how to raise your feminine energy» were some of the mantras told to me by over fifty female coaches I met over the course of nearly one year in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Many teachers offered me an experience of femininity through bodily senses and emotions, which also formed part of their theory: femininity can’t be explained, it can only be felt. On the one hand, this experience became a way to think about the position of women in contemporary Russia. In places where rights for men and women are still not equal, the interpretation of gender stereotypes into a form of irrational power could provide possibilities for women to gain control over their lives. On the other hand, this project became an investigation into the connection between our desire to believe in magic, irrational powers and a means to reach happiness by effortlessly fulfilling our wishes. The project consists of several types of documentation. There are portraits of different coaches whom I asked about femininity, some text records of their stories and a video projection that documents the feminine energy practices they offered me. The final part of the project is a site-specific video performance: I appear on television and share my “newfound feminine energy” with everyone who wants to receive it, following the theory that every woman gains magic powers as soon as she accepts her true self.

“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.

It is early morning and young Russian couples, inhabitants of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, are sleeping in their bedrooms. They're preparing to become parents in few months, and the camera documents both their poses and also the details of their interiors. Bed sheets, objects of daily life and decorations tell how the last generation born before the fall of the Soviet Union currently lives in big cities of modern Russia. 40 images in complete series Saint Petersburg, Moscow 2009-2015

Traveling across Wales — whose people have been struggling for their identity ever since they lost their independence in the Middle Ages — Russian photographer Jana Romanova experimented with her own identity and tried to become Welsh, following advice from local people.

This project is an exploration of the concept of beauty and femininity in modern society through a series of self-portraits. I asked different young women to choose poses for a portrait and copied them, standing nearby or in the background. My attempts to perform exact copies of their poses and expressions create an ironic image and address the societal attitude towards women and the role photography plays in it. Latvia, Russia 2011-2018