Women-Led Galleries Now | AAIE

Women-Led Galleries Now | AAIE 
Curated by Valeria Contarino
 
Through this virtual exhibition, AAIE, a women-led platform based in Rome, reaffirms its commitment to championing women artists by presenting works by Giulia Seri, Meng Donglai, and Chiara Ressetta, three artists whose practices explore how personal and collective realities are constructed through memory, narrative, and perception. Curated by independent curator Valeria Contarino, the presentation brings together distinct yet resonant artistic approaches that reflect on the emotional and symbolic structures shaping contemporary experience.
 
Across painting and mixed media, the works investigate the fragile territories where private memory intersects with shared cultural imagination. Rather than depicting reality directly, the artists construct spaces in which stories, images, and emotions reveal the invisible frameworks through which contemporary life is understood.
 
Giulia Seri approaches artistic practice as a ritualistic and exorcistic gesture. Through delicate materials, pastel tones, and symbolic forms reminiscent of prayers or ex-votos, her works transform experiences of illness, vulnerability, and loss into intimate acts of resistance and emotional healing.
 
Meng Donglai examines how narratives circulate in contemporary digital culture. Drawing from urban legends and algorithmically generated imagery such as Google Street View, her paintings explore how collective anxieties and myths are embedded within everyday landscapes, questioning the apparent neutrality of technological vision.
 
Chiara Ressetta constructs suspended pictorial environments where domestic interiors merge with archaeological references. Her paintings evoke spaces of layered time in which objects, figures, and architectural fragments coexist, suggesting a dialogue between personal memory and collective cultural history.
 
Together, the works reveal how images and narratives—whether intimate, mythical, or technological—shape the ways in which contemporary reality is perceived, remembered, and emotionally experienced.