Maria Mavropoulou. Family Portraits

Through her “Family Portraits” series, Maria Mavropoulou strives to understand the new everyday realities created by our ubiquitous connectable devices. It is a series of photographs that depict interior domestic spaces, where human presence has been replaced by the devices that they use. Set in the darkened environment of generic modern interiors, photographs such as Sunday Afternoon, Evening with Friends, and Anniversary Dinner draw attention to the luminosity of the screens and their presence as inanimate entities in all instances of our interpersonal lives, creating parallel universes and intimating a sense of absence. Have these extensions of our hands, bodies and minds facilitated new and meaningful experiences and relationships, or have they simply replaced our close friends, family or even lovers?

Maria Mavropoulou uses mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of the photographic image, such as VR and screen captured images. Her research focuses on the new realities created by the connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the digital spaces that we inhabit. Her aesthetics explore the boundary line between plausibility or not, potentiality and non-potentiality, random and constructed. Playing with the perception of viewers she aspires to question the role and power of photography in an era that is dominated by it. Her first VR project “Family Portraits” has been awarded at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2019).

Biography

Maria Mavropoulou lives and works in Athens. She completed her MFA studies at Athens School of Fine Arts in 2018, from where she attained her BA in 2014. Her work has been presented in the Culturescapes festival (Basel, CH, 2017), Athens Photo Festival (EL, 2016), Krakow Photomonth (PL, 2016), Athens Biennale 5 to 6 (EL, 2015, 2017), 5th Thessaloniki Biennale (EL, 2015), Mois de la photo (Paris, FR, 2014), European month of photography (Budapest, HU, 2014), Fotoistanbul (Istanbul, TR, 2014) and Benaki museum (Athens, EL, 2014). She is a member of the Depression Era collective of artists who inhabit the urban and social landscapes of the crisis and post-crisis in Greece.

https://www.mariamavropoulou.com/

 


 

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