Melania Toma

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Melania Toma is an Italian multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London. At the center of her practice lies the exploration of the narrative subjectivity – intersubjective we, within historically situated traversing webs of gender, power hierarchies, and ecological degradation.

These intersectional analyses include less visible ‘intimate’ scales, such as concepts of hybrid femininity, structures of domesticity, and the possibilities of the transformative power of the self. She questions the palimpsest of colonial ideologies and narratives that are necessarily linked to them through a research that highlights the theme of collecting as a practice. She weaves a web that is not only rooted in one geographical place and culture but as interconnected process around the notion of cure.

Her visual semantics is populated by symbols mutating into a collective act. She creates works that serve as trans-morphing objects whose extrinsic power crosses the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘I’, producing new ecological imaginaries and understandings of inner or “domestic” places. All her projects are focused on proposing a rite of liberation toward the recovery of a disintegrated and disconnected self.
Her latest production addresses collective healing and binge-healing notions by creating sculptures conceived as ghost-hybrid creatures. These embodiments are questioning the schisms of biomedicine inside post-human beings that are profoundly linked with the social-environmental context and the unseen realm of spirits.