Things that happen inside and outside of me

Fondazione Galleria Milano presents Things that happen inside and outside of me, a solo exhibition by Mara Palena, curated by Laura Lamonea and accompanied by her introductory text.

The project, developed in close collaboration with the Foundation, proposes a multidisciplinary investigation in which different expressive languages engage in dialogue with the architecture of the exhibition space, creating a profound relationship between physical space and visual research.

Mara Palena’s work moves between the conscious and the unconscious, the present and memory, reworking existential fragments through methods of self-investigation ranging from psychoanalysis to sound therapy and EMDR. Her research transforms the intimate sphere into a collective experience, inviting the viewer into a potentially infinite mnemonic archive, generating projections that continuously fade away and re-emerge. Things that happen inside and outside of metransports the viewer into an intimate and personal place, amplified, light and tragic, rich with possibilities, much like adolescence itself: “a gateway, a palimpsest that Palena constantly rewrites and formalizes through images, sound, writing […]. Adolescence is a persistent state of mind and a way of being in the world in which every experience is amplified and repeated” (Laura Lamonea).

Most of the works were produced specifically for the exhibition in 2026. On the first floor, in the main hall, the 1960s iron windows frame prints of screenshots taken from videos from the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco, reworked through artificial intelligence processes — an encounter and clash between private memory and the collective unconscious (Goodbye Fear Dreams) — alongside texts cut from personal writings (Una volta ero tra i tuoi eroi). In the same room is the installation Casa degli Specchi: reclaimed mirrors, massive and marked by deterioration, whose imperfect materiality renders memory frayed and therefore universal, accompanied by an audio track with sound distortions by Donato Panaccio (Vanishing Loud). Completing the floor is an imperfect and vulnerable sculptural model (Home/Home/Home), inspired by the family home on the Island of Elba, Villa Poliz.

On the lower floor, in the archive space, the video work Reprojected Movement (2024), filmed at Villa Poliz, stages everyday actions from the artist’s adolescence reperformed in the present: an encounter between the adult woman and the past in which she shaped her own personality. The final work is a telephone placed among the bookshelves of the Foundation’s library, an intimate and historical setting, through which Mara, now an adult woman, reads passages from her adolescent diary (Noia, mare, che ci posso fare?, 2026). The entire exhibition path is built upon continuous references: “memories almost never emerge as isolated units; they call each other back according to associative logics” (Laura Lamonea).

The public program includes two events: on Wednesday, June 3 at 8:30 PM, a performance at the Casa degli Specchiinside EuroPark Milano Idroscalo.

On a date to be announced in June, the presentation of the homonymous volume published by Artphilein Editions (2025), winner of the De Pietri Artphilein Foundation Photobook Contest 2024. The book reflects the materiality of the exhibition through a careful selection of papers that structure the pages of texts and images, with contributions by Matilde Scaramellini and the artist herself, taking shape as a physical object that extends the immersive experience of the exhibition beyond the gallery walls.

Things that happen inside and outside of me is realized in collaboration with the De Pietri Artphilein Foundation of Lugano.

Special thanks to the winery Alcesti for serving the wines Isola dei profumi and Heila.

Mara Palena (1988) lives and works in Milan. Her research focuses on memory, recollection, and identity through photography, video, and sound. She reworks material from open and participatory archives — such as home movie archives — and draws from a personal archive of photographic images through which she has documented her life for years. Her work has been exhibited in international festivals, spaces, and galleries: in Milan at Careof, Fondazione Galleria Milano, Marsèll Paradise, Nowhere Gallery, Pananti Atelier, Podbielski Contemporary, and Video Sound Art; internationally at Loop Barcelona, the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid, MOPLA in Los Angeles, Artphilein Foundation in Lugano, Guardian Art Center in Beijing, Olimpia Contemporanea, and Recontemporary in Turin. The work Oikeiôsiswon the Surprize 2022 award, promoted by Sprint and Fondazione Marcelo Burlon. The publishing project, curated and published by Witty Books in 2023, was included by Photo España among the 100 best books published in 2024. In 2024, the project Things that happen inside and outside of me won the De Pietri Artphilein Foundation Photobook Contest.

Installetion view, ph Anastasia Mercuri e Celine Alma