Halmoni

HALMONI is the first solo exhibition by Martina Oldani (Milan, 1999).

Halmoni, the Korean word for “grandmother,” is the title of a project born from a reflection on language, memory, and the ways in which images preserve time. Through photography, video, installation, and cyanotype, Martina Oldani creates a body of work that begins with her own family history to explore universal themes such as ageing, memory, and the transmission of experience across generations.
The project originates in the family archive: photographs, letters, notes, and objects once belonging to the artist’s grandparents become the material she works with, reinterpreting them and removing them from their original function as private documents. Rather than serving as a simple record of the past, the archive is approached as an open space, capable of generating new narratives and new meanings.

Photography plays a central role in the project, particularly cyanotype, an early photographic process that transforms images into surfaces marked by deep blue tones. Through this technique, the photographs lose their purely documentary character and acquire a new dimension, suspended between personal memory and the collective imagination.
Although the project originates from an autobiographical experience, HALMONI soon moves beyond the individual narrative to examine the value of family archives as a shared cultural heritage. Every photograph kept in a drawer, every hastily written note, every forgotten object tells a story that extends beyond those who lived it, becoming a reflection on time and on the capacity of images to outlive the people who created them.
The exhibition also includes the outcomes of a workshop developed in collaboration with the residents of Fondazione Biffi – Residenza Villa Antonietta, extending the artist’s research into a participatory dimension. In this context, old age is viewed not as a condition of marginality, but as a repository of experiences, relationships, and memories that continues to generate new narratives.
With HALMONI, Martina Oldani offers a reflection on the relationship between photography and memory, showing how every family archive is not merely a collection of memories, but a living organism—one that can be continuously reinterpreted and rewritten through the gaze of those who engage with it.