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Susanna Fiona Murray, visual artist
Statement
My research focuses on what tends to remain at the margins of the most widely shared narratives of human experience. We are accustomed to constructing fairly well-defined narratives about what we experience: we assign roles, recognise behaviours and emotions, and give our experiences meanings that help us understand and articulate them. In this process, however, something inevitably remains out of focus.
My work stems from an interest in these less visible areas: contradictions, vulnerabilities, ambivalences, and everything that can be difficult to name or even to think. Through photography, staging, and installation, I seek to shift the point of view away from more established narratives, looking at what normally remains in the background.
I am interested in introducing a small degree of friction into the narrative, a space of doubt capable of questioning what seems already defined. In this way, my work seeks to convey a less linear experience of being human, one in which vulnerabilities, limitations, uncomfortable emotions, and contradictions can coexist.
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La mia ricerca si concentra su ciò che tende a rimanere ai margini delle narrazioni più condivise dell’esperienza umana. Siamo abituati a costruire racconti abbastanza definiti di ciò che viviamo: attribuiamo ruoli, riconosciamo comportamenti ed emozioni e diamo alle esperienze significati che ci aiutano a comprenderle e a raccontarle. In questa costruzione, però, qualcosa inevitabilmente rimane fuori fuoco.
Il mio lavoro nasce dall’interesse per queste zone meno evidenti: le contraddizioni, le fragilità, le ambivalenze e tutto ciò che può essere difficile da nominare o pensare. Attraverso la fotografia, la messa in scena e l’installazione cerco di spostare il punto di vista rispetto alle narrazioni più consolidate, guardando ciò che normalmente resta sullo sfondo.
Mi interessa introdurre una piccola frizione nel racconto, uno spazio di dubbio capace di mettere in discussione ciò che sembra già definito. Il mio lavoro cerca così di restituire un’esperienza umana meno lineare, in cui possono convivere fragilità, limiti, emozioni spiacevoli e contraddizioni.
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
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
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