Chiara Valci Mazzara

Her curatorial practice unfolds across Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, where she collaborates with artists, collections, foundations, institutions, festivals, biennials, and funding bodies. After almost two decades of working through horizontal collaborations, Chiara has developed a practice grounded in conceptual development, research, and independent curation for public and private institutions. This working model, in which networking and outreach enable the co-development of diverse projects, has evolved into a long-term collaborative ecosystem. Conceived as an adaptive, relational approach, it places shared authorship, distributed expertise, and sustained partnerships at the centre of each project, from conception to realisation.

From the early stages of her curatorial practice, Chiara has engaged with avant-garde artistic tendencies, focusing on body art, conceptual art, performance art, Happenings, Arte Povera, Fluxus, contemporary informal photography, and cross-media expressions. In recent years, her interests have expanded towards spatial and time-based artistic practices and their anthropological and societal implications.

Over the past four years, she has also worked as a curator, researcher, and lecturer within SPACEX (Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange), a European Commission-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) project. Spanning eight countries, the initiative brought together a network of twelve research institutes and seventeen art institutions across Europe and the United Kingdom. Within this framework, Chiara participated in collaborative research initiatives with the Royal College of Art in London, the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, among other institutions.

Valci Mazzara’s research engages with site-specificity, temporality, conceptual development, interaction, process, and execution within installation and performative practices. She is particularly interested in gestural and performative modes that shape ephemeral installations and process-based works, approaching them as continuous reflections of broader socio-anthropological conditions and entanglements. Her writing and curatorial practice further investigate artistic expressions that examine, or emerge from, human behavioural patterns, social inheritances, collective memory, and their systems of transmission. Her work ultimately explores how societal paradigms and socio-political complexities intersect with the ways in which human interactions, expressions, events, and artefacts manifest, articulate, coexist, and hybridise, without hierarchical distinctions or fixed determinations.

Throughout her career, Chiara has contributed to institutional coordination and project management, subsequently curating  numerous solo and group exhibitions, installations, and performances by artists including Shozo Shimamoto, Hermann Nitsch, Julian Beck and Judith Malina, Allan Kaprow and more recently Vadim Zakharov, Ann Noël Williams, Dieter Roth, Nam June Paik, Junko Wada, Jannis Kounellis, Henrik Strömberg, Maurizio Elettrico, Han Chung-Shik, Sun Kwan-Kwon, David Krippendorff, Daniela Comani, Baran Caginli, Thomas De Falco, Mateusz Choróbski, and Marco Siciliano, among many others.

Chiara’s curatorial work has often received international critical attention. Her essays on artists including Man Ray, Zhang Huan, Urs Lüthi, Sofia Hultén, Louise Nevelson, Ingrid Wiener, VALIE EXPORT, and Dieter Roth, among others, have appeared in international art magazines, monographs, books, exhibition catalogues, contemporary art and photography publications, and national newspapers.