What is the use of a photograph? If nothing else, it’s a reference point to a specific moment in time, the moment of its creation, the moment it depicts. Especially family photographs are a tie to our personal history, an archive of who we are and where we came from. They are “memory deposits” from where we keep sourcing the certainty of our life events even if our own memories of them are lost. In this new project, personal memories are absorbed by A.I. and meshed with thousands of others to become a new breed of images, images resembling in an uncanny way those of our childhood photo albums. But what is the use of this new kind of image since they lose their fundamental tie to reality? What is the memory they hold? To whom are they precious, heirlooms that must be preserved?
Trying to reconcile with my family history, one of displacement, loss and deprivation I visualized with the use of DALLE-2 moments that happened, unphotographed moments, moments I imagined, moments I was told about, moments I have hoped to happen, moments that never happened in order to ask myself: How can one rewrite his own history?
Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989, she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is a visual artist using mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of photographic images, such as VR and screen-captured images, GAN and AI-generated images. Her work and research focus on the new realities created by the connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the virtual spaces that we inhabit, addressing issues of technological mediation. By using the most novel technology available to her, she creates work that reflects on the new ways images are produced today. Her work explores digital identity and representation in the post-social media era, algorithmic bias, network culture, power politics between machines and humans, and the multidimensionality of our experiences in our always-online world. Her recent projects correlate creativity and AI with the divine as well as reflect on the future of photography amidst the advances of synthetic images.
Maria holds a Master’s in Fine Arts and a BA from the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her work is part of private collections and Vontobel art collection and has been exhibited in institutions and museums in Greece and abroad among which are the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Greece- EMST (2022), Sharjah Foundation (United Arab Emirates 2022), Foto Colectania, (Spain 2022), Tallinn Art Hall, (Estonia 2021), Miami Art week, (2020), 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival(2019), Thessaloniki Museum of Photography(2019), Onassis cultural center (2019), Athens Conservatoire(2019), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia, USA 2019), Maison de la Photographie, (France 2018), Benaki museum(2018), Unseen Amsterdam, (Netherlands 2018) National Observatory of Athens (2018), Culturescapes festival
(Basel, Switzerland, 2017) Athens Photo Festival (2016), Athens Biennale (2015) Mois de la photo,(Paris, France, 2014). Her first VR project Family Portraits has been awarded at the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2019), and she has also been selected among 30 Under 30 Women Photographers (2018) and a Young Greek Photographer by Athens Photo Festival (2016).
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