artist statement + biography








Susanna Fiona Murray, visual artist 


Statement

My practice constructs visual and spatial narratives through omission, subtraction and partial disclosure. Through photography, archive and installation, I create familiar spaces that slowly lose reassurance and stability. 

I am interested in works that resist immediate readability and refuse full emotional closure. 

In this way, absence, ambiguity and unease become active parts of the viewer’s experience.


La mia pratica costruisce narrazioni visive e spaziali basate su omissioni, sottrazioni e rivelazioni parziali. Con fotografia, archivio e installazione creo spazi familiari che poco alla volta perdono equilibrio e smettono di rassicurare. 

Mi interessano lavori che non si lasciano leggere subito e che non offrono una piena chiusura emotiva. 

Così assenza, ambiguità e inquietudine diventano parte dell’esperienza di chi guarda.

Biography

Susanna Fiona Murray is an Italian-British visual artist working with staged photography, archival materials, and installation. Her practice begins with archives, photographs, objects, artefacts, and stories, which become the starting point for creating suspended visual narratives where memory, image, and perception intertwine.

Interested in what, although present, often remains unnoticed, her work invites viewers to slow down and reconsider what they are looking at. Through staged photography and a dialogue with pre-existing materials, she explores absence, permanence, and the relationship between individual experience and collective history.

She began working with photography in 2016, developing her practice through courses and workshops with contemporary artists and photographers. She later studied portrait and fashion photography at the International Center of Photography in New York, where she refined her approach to staging as a narrative and image-making strategy.

In 2025, she developed the project After Us during an artistic residency at the Archaeological Section of the Oliveriani Museums in Pesaro, in collaboration with Centrale Fotografia. The work brings into dialogue ancient funerary rituals and contemporary absence, reflecting on what remains of human presence over time.

Her main projects include The Dianara, a series reinterpreting the folkloric figure of the Janara to investigate cultural constructions of the feminine; Mrs. Hollow is coming to play, a visual narrative on social roles and emotional displacement; and About Mary, a project based on family archives that addresses migration and the transformation of identity across generations.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and was selected for the Italian Artist Collection 2020 curated by Italy Photo Award. In 2026, she was shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival.

Murray lives and works in Pesaro. She holds a degree in Psychology from the University of Bologna.



EXHIBITIONS

2026 Premio Combat Prize 2026, Museo della città, Livorno, Italy

2025-2026 "After us", solo exhibition, curated by Centrale Fotografia, Musei Oliveriani, Musei
Civici e Comune di Pesaro, Pesaro, Italy

2023 "Sono ciò che indosso?", group exhibition, Roma Fotografia, Castel Sant’Angelo, Palazzo Massimo, Palazzo Altemps, Roma, Italy

2022 "Out of blindness", group exhibition, Galleria Condominio Arte, Milano, Italy

2022 "The closest thing to us", solo exhibition, Passaggi Festival, Fano, Italy

2022 "Prova di trasmissioni" group exhibition, Centrale Festival, Fano, Italy

2022 "Specie di spazi", group exhibition, Treviso, Italy

2022 "Siamo tutt* Artemide", Sorelle Festival, group exhibition, Faenza, Italy

2020 "Home", group exhibition, Rome, Italy

2020 “Macula Lab Experience _4”,  group exhibition, Pesaro, Italy

2019 “Gavardiana 2019”, group exhibition, Pesaro, Italy

2019 “Ethereal: A Daily Poetry”, group exhibition, Galerie Joseph Turenne, Paris, France

2017 “Macula Lab Experience _1”, group exhibition, Pesaro, Italy



AWARDS AND RECOGNITION

2026 Combat Prize, Livorno, IT, finalist for “After us”, 

2026 Belfast Photo Festival, UK, shortlisted for “After us”, 

2023 Roma Fotografia, Roma, second prize for "Sono ciò che indosso?", 

2020 Italy Photo Awards, shortlisted for IMP Festival Padova, IT

2020 LoosenArt, Roma, shortlisted for “Home”, 

2019 shortlisted for Anatomie, Percorsi Fotosensibili



EDUCATION

M.A. in Psychology, University of Bologna, Italy