Mum’s Disintegration

On Sunday, October 12, 2025, at 11:30 a.m., within the evocative setting of the Chiesa del Purgatorio in Matera, MIP – Matera International Photography APS – ETS, in collaboration with the Oltre l'Arte cooperative, presents "Mum’s Disintegration," the first solo exhibition in Italy by English artist Eli Acheson-Elmassry, curated by Graziella Melania Geraci. The exhibition project is part of the 9th International Visual Art Festival “Matera, the Art that Unites 2.0”.

Known for her participation in exhibitions, symposia, and international events, Eli Acheson-Elmassry is a multidisciplinary artist active on the contemporary scene for over a decade. Her work has been showcased in prestigious institutions and cultural contexts abroad, including the Griffin Gallery in London, the Museum of the Americas in Miami, ARKA Gallery in Vilnius, Kaunas Castle in Lithuania, the Festival des Arts Plastiques de Fès in Morocco, and the International Center of Art in Istanbul. She has also exhibited in Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Lodz, Cairo, and Jeddah, where she has developed an artistic research deeply connected to the body, memory, and transformation.

Throughout her career, the artist has received several accolades, including a Research and Development Grant (2016) and a Small Production Grant (2017) from the Arts Council of Wales, as well as the prestigious John Kinross Award for sculpture awarded by the Royal Scottish Academy in 1990.

Eli Acheson-Elmassry transforms her personal experiences into works that appear as a second layer of skin, tactile forms that redefine and exorcise the past. Her experiments create an identity language, a universe that at first glance seems to belong to a dream world, between fantasy and reality, between superficiality and pain, a narrative that occurs through the use of latex and other media.

The intervention presented in Matera, “Mum’s Disintegration,” offers the Italian audience a poetic and dramatic journey that delicately and intensely tells a part of the artist's life and her relationship with suffering. The artist shapes memories and sensations, exploring the loss of identity and the fragility of her mother's mind afflicted by Alzheimer’s.

Thus, the installation "Mum’s Sad Angry Clock" represents the suspended time of the illness; the latex casting of everyday pots and pans becomes a symbolic clock crystallizing the memory and anger of the disease.

In the video “Discord - Collapse of Mum,” the artist evokes the definitive decline, the ultimate drift of an identity erased among sounds and images reminiscent of the sea and Welsh nature, where memory slowly dissolves.

Eli Acheson-Elmassry will participate virtually, through an online connection, at the inauguration while, in addition to the Institutions, the organizers Carla Cantore President and Antonello Di Gennaro Artistic Director of MIP – Matera International Photography, and the curator Graziella Melania Geraci will be present.

The event is granted by the Diocesan Institute for Clergy Support of the Archdiocese of Matera-Irsina and is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, State Archive of Matera, Basilicata Region, Regional Council of Basilicata, Province of Matera, Municipality of Matera, APT Basilicata, Chamber of Commerce of Basilicata.
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