Female perspectives on the contemporary world
Founded in Rome on March 6, 2025, by Emanuela Zamparelli, Galleria ZEMA is an independent space dedicated exclusively to the promotion of contemporary women’s photography. The gallery represents Italian and international female photographers whose work is united by an independent, critical, and conscious perspective on the present.
Through an exhibition programme that brings together artistic research, social engagement and cultural reflection, ZEMA aims to be a space for visibility and dialogue, where the body, identity, memory and conflict become subjects to be explored with depth and sensitivity.
Choosing to represent only women artists is a cultural and political choice: an act of trust in the narrative power of perspectives that have often been marginalised, yet are essential to understanding the complexity of our time.
As Carla Lonzi wrote, “women’s art is art insofar as it is a gesture that transforms reality”; and photography is one of those gestures that, more than others, makes it possible to give form to lived experience and memory, rebellion and intimacy.
In this sense, Susan Sontag’s words also resonate: “to photograph is to confer importance” (On Photography, 1977). The images we choose to exhibit are acts of recognition, instruments of testimony, but also ways of inhabiting the world with awareness.
ZEMA is not just a gallery, but a curatorial project, a living space where photography becomes language, connection and resistance.