Chiara Valci Mazzara

Chiara Alexandra Vittoria Valci Mazzara is an independent curator, researcher, author, and writer born in Rome and based in Berlin.

Her curatorial practice unfolds across Europe, East Asia, and Southeast Asia, where she collaborates with artists, collections, foundations, institutions, festivals, biennials, and funding bodies.

During the last four years, she additionally served as a researcher and lecturer for the project SPACEX (Spatial Practices in Art and Architecture for Empathetic Exchange), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research, Innovation and Exchange Action funded by the European Commission and developed across eight countries through a network of twelve research institutes and seventeen art institutions across Europe and the UK.

After almost two decades of working within horizontal collaborations, Chiara has developed a practice grounded in conceptual development, research, and independent curation for both public and private institutions. This working model—where networking and outreach enable the co-development of diverse projects to form a long-term collaborative ecosystem—has become her core method conceived as an adaptive, relational approach which ensures that shared authorship, distributed expertise, and long-term partnerships shape every project from concept to realization.

From the early phases of her curatorial practice, Chiara has worked within the framework of avant-garde artistic tendencies, focusing on body art, conceptual art, performance art, Happenings, Arte Povera, contemporary informal photography, and cross-media expressions. In recent years, her interests have expanded toward spatial and time-based art developed as echoing anthropological and societal reverberations.

Her research engages with site-specificity, temporality, conceptual development, interaction, process, and execution within installation and performative practices. She further concentrates on gestural and performative modes that determine or connote ephemeral installations and process-based works, viewing them as uninterrupted, indirect mirrors of contemporary socio-anthropological axes and entanglements. Her writing and curatorial approach also investigate artistic expressions that examine or emerge from human behavioral patterns, social inheritances, collective memory, and their systems of dissemination. Ultimately, Chiara explores how societal paradigms and socio-political complexities intersect with the ways human interactions, expressions, facts, and artifacts manifest, articulate, coexist, or hybridize, without hierarchical distinction or fixed determination.

Throughout her career, Chiara has contributed to the coordination, project management, curation, and production of numerous projects and  she has curated solo exhibitions, installations, and performances by artists such as Shozo Shimamoto, Hermann Nitsch, Julian Beck and Judith Molina, Allan Kaprow, Vettor Pisani, Henri Chopin,  Vadim Zakharov, Ann Noël Williams, Junko Wada, Henrik Strömberg, Maurizio Elettrico, Han Chung-Chik, 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 been reviewed internationally, and her essays have been published in monographs, books, catalogues, contemporary art and photography magazines, as well as in national and international newspapers.