Artist
Giulia Parlato
Giulia Parlato (b.1993) is an Italian visual artist based in London and Palermo.
She graduated from the BA (Hons) Photography at London College of Communication in 2016 and from the MA Photography at the Royal College of Arts in 2019.
Her practice delves into histories, myths and cultural heritage, involving photography and video. She analyses the historical use of photography as a document of truth, specifically in its scientific and forensic uses, and challenges this language, by creating a new space in which staged scenes take place. The melancholic and frustrating state, caused by humans’ impossibility to understand the past constitutes the foundation of her work.
Giulia’s work is shown nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions including Podbielski Contemporary Gallery (Milan, 2021), Photo London Fair (London, 2020), Photo Fringe (Brighton, 2020), Palazzo Rasponi 2 (Ravenna, 2020), Galleria Cavour for Photo Open Up (Padova, 2020), Gare Du Nord for Paris Photo (Paris 2019), Kunstgebaude for Soft Power Palace Festival (Stuttgart, 2018); and featured extensively in printed and online publications. She is the recipient of the BJP International Photography Award (2021), the Innovate Grant (2020), Camera Work Award (2020) and the Carte Blanche Éstudiants Award (2019).
Talks and Commissions include Paris Photo, The Photographers' Gallery, Cambridge School of Visual & Performing Arts, and Art Licks.
She is a founder member of Ardesia Projects, a curatorial platform dedicated to contemporary photography, and of the Carte Blanche Collective.
Giulia's work is held in public and private collections.
Diachronicles
Diachronicles is an examination of the historical space, regarded as a fictional container where an apparent collection of evidence opens up to the fantastic. In this space, the attempt to reconstruct the past falls into phantasmal gaps, where things are generated, used, buried, unearthed, transported, and relocated.
This nomadic and fragmentary nature of what has been left behind, reveals how the movement, transfiguration, and misinterpretation of objects shape historiography and ultimately, the real.
In the impossible search of academic legitimation, the viewer is invited into a world where the factual and the fake overlap. The work addresses the leading role archaeology and the museum space play in a historical narrative, using the human body to suggest scale and as a means to display objects.
Furthermore, Diachronicles digs into a parallel history, filled with poetic figures to decode, nonexistent artefacts and forgeries hidden in museums basements.