Alena Zhandarova was born in Ivonovo, Russia, in 1988.
She has got a degree in economics but found her love to photography when she began her first self-portrait project “Cornflower Tea and Concealing Chocolate”. In this work she created a special atmosphere of magic trough the real world, using ordinary things in unusual situations.
Due to this work, she was exhibited in Australia (Captains of Industry, Melbourne, September 2010), Uzbekistan (TashkentALE-2010. Fitfth International Tashkent Exhibition Photo Biennial, Tashkent, October 2010), Spain (NIU : contemporary art space, Barcelona, November 2010), Russia (Gallery KINO, Saint Petersburg, November 2010), United States (The A.D. Gallery, University of North Carolina, Pembroke, February, 2011), Italy (ARTE LAGUNA. Art Prize 10.11, Venice, March 2011), England (Getty Images Gallery, London, August 2011).
She was a finalist of LUCEO Student Project Award (USA, June 2011) and also of Arte Laguna. Art Prize in the category Under 25 (Italy, March 2011). In 2011 she won a grant for education in European Institute of Design to study Masters of Fine Art Photography in Madrid.
Meanwhile she started a new project about her native city Ivanovo, called The City of Brides. Where she began to learn the spirit of magic through young girls and their environment together with their unique experiences.
Alena is an experimental artist, who tries to make this world brighter, saturated and full of holistic, who is free to choose the ways and chances to tell the story.
Since 2010 Alena has been represented by AnzenbergerGallery.
Press release :
On May 12, The Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography opens the exhibition New Spread presenting works and books of modern Russian photographers within the PHOTOBOOKFEST 2017 festival. Exhibition curator Anastasia Bogomolova is a young artist, researcher and book collector from the Urals.
Over the recent years, the format of the photobook, which enjoyed several waves of popularity abroad, has become for the Russian artists an advanced photographic practice, experimental site and instrument of promotion of their work among international audience. Russian photographers’ books are now regularly short-listed in major contests and awards, and spark steady interest of the experts in the field at the European fairs.
New Spread exhibition is an attempt to explore the modern Russian photobook lan...
The self-portrait is the biggest challenge that an artist can take on. The exhibition, "Me, Myself & I", presents seven contemporary positions on how a woman can approach the enterprise of the self-portrait as a photographic artist: starting on the conceptual rather than the documentary side, enacted and performed several times, with an epistemological view, or borrowing visual arrangements from well-known works by other photographers.
The variety of digital image recording devices available—which are presently not only in the form of cameras, but are available practically everywhere at any time, whether they are built into computers, mobile phones, etc.—encourage us, alongside photographers and artists, to constantly produce our own self-portraits and to show them on the internet and soc...