Overcoming

Curator's Statement:

 

We overcome things every day, often without even noticing. Something that feels impossible today may one day become something we look back at and realize that somehow, we made it through. Maybe changed, maybe still carrying parts of it with us, but no longer in the same place.

Through Overcoming, people I had never met let me into very personal parts of their lives. I spent time with their photographs, read their stories, and somewhere along the way, they made me look differently at parts of my own life too.

Maybe this is what happens when someone shares something deeply personal with us. We enter another person’s story and, sometimes, unexpectedly find a part of our own. Who would we be today without everything we have already overcome, everything we are still trying to get through, and everything we may have to face tomorrow?

To every photographer who became part of Overcoming — thank you for letting us come so close to something that belongs to your life. Some of these stories were difficult to look at, and I can only imagine how difficult they were to live through, and then to share. I will carry many of them with me long after this exhibition is over.

And I hope that somewhere, someone looking at your photograph will find something they need in that moment — perhaps even the quiet realization that they, too, will make it through.

 

Teona Machavariani

August, 2026