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 works with artists, collections, foundations, institutions, festivals, biennials and funding institutions. She additionally served as curator, practitioner and lecturer in 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 the work of twelve research institutes and seventeen art institutions.

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

From the early phases of her curatorial practice, Chiara has worked within the frames 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 and its 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 which determine or connote ephemeral installations and process-based works, considered as uninterrupted or indirect mirror of the contemporary socio-anthropological axes and entanglements. Her writing and curatorial approach further investigate artistic expressions that examine or emerge from human behavioural patterns, social inheritances, collective memory, and their systems of divulgence. Ultimately, Chiara explores how societal paradigms and socio-political complexities with the ways hereto human interactions, expressions,  facts and artefacts manifest, articulate, coexist or hybridise, with or without hierarchical distinction or fixed determination.

Throughout her career, Chiara has contributed to the coordination, project management, curation and production of numerous projects and later curated solo exhibitions, installations, and performances by artists such as Shozo Shimamoto, Hermann Nitsch, Julian Beck and Judith Molina, Allan Kaprow, Vettor Pisani, Vadim Zakharov, Ann Noël Williams, Henrik Strömberg, Maurizio Elettrico, Han Chung-Shik, Sun Kwan-Kwon, David Krippendorff, Daniela Comani, 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, and national and international newspapers.