Ocula

Ana Mazzei: How to Disappear
Green Art Gallery, Unit 28, Alserkal Avenue
27 February–20 April 2024

Expect: a staged inquiry typical of the Brazilian artist who presents a fictional narrative centring a vanished ballerina.

Mazzei is well known for theatrical sculptures and installations drawing from architecture, literature, and mythology. Breaking the fourth wall, they stage fictional scenarios that prompt viewers to consider how they inhabit their bodies and space.

As Stephanie Bailey remarked in 2022: 'Mazzei doesn't create works so much as she makes stages out of them.'

How to Disappear is conceived around the narrative of a vanished ballerina. The exhibition, Mazzei's fourth with Green Art Gallery, presents a collection of bronze-cast deities—among them a praying frog, a beaked Pegasus, and an aged Centaur—alongside 50 paintings of geometric and biomorphic forms, which hint at the possibility of being born anew.