Malena szlam

Malena Szlam is a Chilean-born filmmaker and visual artist based in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal. Through her practice, Szlam reimagines connections between human beings and the natural world. Attentive to how geopolitics are intertwined with natural phenomena, her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the affective dimensions of analogue film processes. Her recent projects focus on geology, earth sciences, and volcanology. She has collaborated with composers and scientists— including Lawrence English, Clive Oppenheimer, and Susannah Buchan—to create soundscapes that emanate from the Earth’s crust, the ocean, and the atmosphere.

Szlam’s work has been exhibited widely at festivals and museums, including Toronto International Film Festival, MoMA, New Directors/New Films, Media City Film Festival, FICValdivia, Jeonju IFF, Cinéma du Réel, Open City Documentary Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam. Her award-winning film ALTIPLANO (2018) received the Best Experimental Short Film prize at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Recent group exhibitions include Energy Fields: Vibrations of the Pacific, PST ART: Art & Science Collide (Los Angeles), femmes volcans forêts torrents, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Expanded Plus: Utopian Phantom, Factory of Contemporary Arts Palbok (South Korea); The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark). Solo presentations include Inexistent Time presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and Infra— at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art. 

Writing about Szlam’s work has been featured on Artforum, Palgrave Handbook, Film Comment, e-flux, and other publications by writers, including Ela Bittencourt, Gwynne Fulton, Éline Grignard, Jessica Mulvogue, Ara Osterweil, Jasmine Pisapia, and Michael Sicinski.

Szlam’s work is included in the MoMA’s permanent collection.