Mariam Giunashvili (Mzesu)
Mariam Giunashvili, also known as Mzesu, is a self-taught documentary photographer born and raised in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her practice explores memory, identity, intimacy, and the ways people navigate life within changing social and political realities. Working primarily through long-term projects, she combines documentary photography with a personal and experimental approach, often moving between her own experiences and the lives of the people around her.
She began photographing around ten years ago, initially as a way of holding on to memories and understanding the passage of time. What started as a personal practice gradually grew into an ongoing investigation of the world around her, particularly the lives of young people growing up in post-Soviet Georgia. Her decade-long project Disposable Highsfollows a generation searching for identity, freedom, and belonging amid political uncertainty, shifting social values, and the contradictions of everyday life.
Having spent years working in Tbilisi’s bars and nightlife spaces, she became interested in people and communities that often remain outside the conventional frame. Her work moves between private moments and public life, intimacy and resistance, everyday gestures and moments of rupture. In recent years, her practice has increasingly engaged with political unrest, state violence, migration, and the fragile relationship between personal freedom and the place one calls home.
Alongside her photographic practice, Giunashvili develops educational programs and mentors emerging photographers through CES — Creative Educational Studio and TPMM School. Her educational work grows out of her own experience of developing long-term projects and explores photography as a tool for observation, self-expression, critical thinking, and understanding the world around us.
Her work has been exhibited in Georgia and internationally. In 2019, she participated in the Canon workshop at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France. She was a finalist for the 2025 Magnum Foundation's Inge Morath Award and a recipient of grants from the Prince Claus Fund, GCRT, and TPMM. In 2021, she received first prize in the Amateur Photographer category of the KIU Photo Contest.
Her work is an ongoing process of research into time, human behavior, and the ways personal experience intersects with collective memory. Rather than seeking definitive answers, she uses photography to stay close to the questions, contradictions, and changes that shape the lives of the people she photographs — and her own.