Edit profile
The

Artist

Mara Palena (1988) lives and works in Milan. Her research focuses on themes such as memory, recollection, and identity. She works with photography, video, and sound, reworking materials from archives, often open and participatory, like home movies, and drawing on a personal archive of photographic images that she has been curating for years to document her life. Her work has been exhibited at various international festivals, venues, and galleries, including the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, Galleria Studio G7 in Bologna, Careof, Marsèll Paradise, Nowhere Gallery, Pananti Atelier, and Video Sound Art in Milan, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Madrid, MOPLA in Los Angeles, Artphilein Foundation in Lugano, and Recontemporary in Turin. Between 2021 and 2024, she was a finalist in several art prizes, including the Lucie Foundation, Combat Prize, Premio Fabbri, New Post Photography, and Artphilein Photo Book Contest. In 2022, she was selected by Camera Torino for FUTURES Photography. Her work Oikeiôsis won the 2022 Surprize Award from Sprint and the Marcelo Burlon Foundation. The editorial project was curated and published by Witty Books in 2023 and was included by Photo España among the 100 best books published in 2024.
Projects
2022

Oikeiôsis

The notion of memory is only one of the motives that pushed Mara Palena to start a long process - potentially infinite - titled of "Oikeiôsis". An ancient Greek word, used to indicate self-realization through the knowledge of the inner self. Using analog archival pictures, produced from the artist's childhood up until today, the process is a continuous image alteration that seems to be regulated by a state of consciousness that is at times fragile and melancholy, sometimes romantic, sometimes sharp - almost violent - but never graspable. Alterations similar to a sound frequency, which regulate the tone of our perception of reality and its aesthetic transposition; universal frequencies that vibrate in the presence of a memory, which permeates every body. Passing through the crowd of a rave, where human profiles can hardly be recognized, the audience find himself in a large cardiac apparatus, which pulsates through the images and sounds of a diary. A memory that not belong to the viewer, but seems warmly familiar.Oikeiôsis is a term introduced by the Stoic philosophers (ca. 300 BC) to indicate the realization, the ultimate goal of living beings. According to the Stoics it is the knowledge of the self, through the synaesthesis, or internal perception. Thanks to this self-knowledge living beings can fly, swim, move without anyone ever having taught them. It contains therefore the strength, health, beauty, functionality of the body, as well as love for one's own species and in man for his community.The full work is a mixed media work where the artist, experimenting the sound therapy, develops with a sound designer, Donato Panaccio, frequencies linked to emotions and feelings trying to reach a deeper understanding of the inner self-awareness.Matilde Scaramellini, Twenty14
Mara
was nominated by
CAMERA Centro Italiano per la Fotografia
in
2022
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.