Award-winning photo exhibition lives on: from banner to carrier bag

We used the banners from the exhibition “Experience tissue donation” to design fashionable and sustainable carrier bags. The bags feature parts of the award-winning exhibition – lettering, informative texts and excerpts from the photographs. Each bag is unique!

Recycling and raising awareness at the same time

For our 15th anniversary in 2022, we organized a large open-air exhibition in Hanover (Germany). The city where our head office is located. For a fortnight in May and June 2022, photos, stories and background information on tissue donation were on display in front of the local State Parliament and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health – freely accessible to the public. As part of the exhibition, we also organised panel discussions in which recipients of tissue transplants shared their experiences and stories. Tissue donation coordinators from the DGFG, doctors and transplant physicians presented the various aspects of tissue donation to a wide audience.

A second life for the exhibition banners

For the open-air installation at Hannah-Arendt-Platz, we printed the “Experience tissue donation”-exhibition on banners, that were several feet long. Fabric that took up a lot of space in our warehouse after the exhibition, but were far too good to throw away: we wanted to give the banners a second life and continue to spread the beautiful images and texts about tissue donation. Therefore we worked with a company that produces fairly and sustainably directly in Hanover and uses bannermaterial to make bags, backpacks and wallets, among other things. They transformed the banners from our exhibition into beautiful carrier bags. Each of them is unique, made from a different part of the “Experience Tissue Donation” exhibition. An opportunity to admire the impressive work of the photographers in a new form.

Taking the images of tissue donation out into the world

We are giving the bags away to people who are committed to tissue donation in a special way. Some “parts of our exhibition” have already crossed national borders and are being used as carrier bags in South Africa, Australia and Brazil.

Showing different aspects of tissue donation

The “Experience tissue donation” exhibition was created in collaboration with students from the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography programme at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts. For more than a year, seven students focused on different perspectives of tissue donation. They have accompanied people who have regained their sight, a functioning heart or a mobile, pain-free joint through tissue transplantations. People who opened their doors and gave the photographers an insight into their lives, their work and families. The exhibition also features behind-the-scenes-images of tissue donation, as well as pictures of tissue donation coordinators, tissue bank staff and transplant surgeons. The images in the exhibition illustrate the different aspects of tissue donation, making this important issue accessible and understandable.