Maria Antelman

Maria Antelman (b. 1971, Athens, Greece) is a visual artist based in New York. She works mainly with 35mm film photography and she holds an MFA in New Genres from Columbia University. Recent exhibitions include Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020 at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; Mechanisms of Affection (solo) at the VAC, UT Austin (2019); Disassembler (solo) at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2018). She has been awarded production grants from the Onassis Foundation USA, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation.

In this quickly changing technological world, we constantly need to negotiate our relationship with memory, identity, physical body, society and similar technicalities. Absorbed in an endless digital present, we live connected to networks that flatten the experience of time. As we become extensions of the technologies we use, our tools change us and change the way we respond to the world. These subtle, yet deep transformations, routed in the complicated systems that machines weave around us, are my main concerns. My practice portrays a collection of failed attempts of the ingenious human spirit to control chaos, find a purpose immersed in an information overflow, decode undecipherable codes, recover from erroneous processes and failed visionary ideas. Misconceptions about the past and the future as well as new and old technologies are a continuous source of inspiration.