Biography 

Malena Szlam Salazar (b. Chile)

Malena Szlam Salazar is a Chilean experimental filmmaker and artist based in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, Québec. Malena has a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Art & Social Sciences (ARCIS) in Santiago, Chile, and a Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from Concordia University (Montréal). Her short films, which include Archipelago of Earthen Bones—To Bunya (2024), MERAPI (2021), ALTIPLANO (2018), Morphology of a Dream (2015-18), and Lunar Almanac (2013) were screened in multiple international film festivals, museums and exhibition spaces worldwide. ALTIPLANO was awarded the 25 FPS’s Grand Prix, the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Best Experimental Short Film, Curtocircuito’s Explora, and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Canada’s Top Ten of 2018. She was also the award recipient of the Prix Giverny Capital (2024) and the Roberto Ariganello Award (2018). 

Malena’s body of work evokes lyrical, embodied responses to human beings’ interactions with landscapes and natural phenomena, whether they be volcanoes, lakes, oceans, Andean high planes, deserts, or moon phases. Her films and installations are distinguished by her in-camera editing techniques, with little post-production involved in the analogue process. Solo exhibitions and retrospectives include Infra— (SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montréal, 2021); SCREEN: Malena Szlam (The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021); Malena Szlam: Inexistent Time (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 2019); and Inexistent Time: A Retrospective of Malena Szlam (Los Angeles Filmforum, CA, 2018). Her work has been featured in the collective exhibitions femmes volcans forêts torrents (curated by Marie-Eve Beaupré, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal–MAC, 2024); Energy Fields: Vibrations of The Pacific (Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Orange, CA, 2024); Each Vertebra is an Extinct Sun (Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France, 2021); In the No Longer Not Yet (curated by Julia Eilers Smith, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal, 2020); and Time Machine: Vedere e Sperimentare il Tempo (curated by Antonio Somaini, Palazzo del Governatore, Parma, Italy, 2020), among others.