Manca Juvan has a BA in Photography and has worked as a freelance photographer, videographer and mentor since 2000. She is the recipient of numerous awards, nominations and outstanding scholarships, including the Magnum Foundation in 2011. She’s had almost an endless number of solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad, including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, as well as other gallery venues and festivals in New York, Brussels, Luxembourg, Paris and elsewhere.
It is with great honour that the Kranj Foto Fest brings Manca’s exhibition Istanbul, Faces of Freedom / ZRC SAZU to the festival’s program in the context of ISOLATION | FREEDOM. As an integral part of the Svoboda metropole – Freedom of Metropolis, T R A N S✴M A K I N G (European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 734855) project, which questions the freedom of urban, metropolitan life, this project also wishes to draw attention to changes in urban spaces. In order to reply to the question “To what extent can the urbanity of metropolises still be equated with freedom?”, Manca has spent six weeks in the Turkish city in 2019 digging for answers.
Dr Oto Luthar wrote about Istanbul, Faces of Freedom: “European cities, which were considered spaces of freedom from the high Middle Ages onwards, are experiencing new groundbreaking changes in regard to the concept of freedom in the new millennium. If until recently metropolises, including Istanbul, were observed as a safe haven for anyone who wanted to break free from the shackles of a rigid traditional way of life or flee political persecution, today‘s perception of urban freedom testifies to the fact that freedom can be restricted at the origin of its birth as well.
On the one hand, it is the fault of the authoritarian policy of the state that wants to control urban spaces in terms of capital and politics, and on the other, it’s in the responsibility of the neoliberal capital, which is enriched most rapidly precisely in an urban space. The extent to which the urbanity of metropolises can still be equated with freedom can also be seen from the faces of those who live there, and Manca Juvan captured this record in her photographic lens.”
