Fani Parali’s artistic practice spans sculpture, sound, performance, painting, drawing, and moving image. Central to her work is the development of lip-sync operas: large-scale performances in which live bodies embody and mime to pre-recorded soundscapes. Through this technique, the voice becomes a spectral presence—both disembodied and hyper-embodied—inviting audiences into states of haunting, vulnerability, and deep listening.
Her work often engages with ecological and temporal questions, positioning mythological or hybrid figures as guardians across scales of time and care. Sculptural works such as Aonyx and Drepan (Frieze Sculpture, 2024) and The Minders of the Warm (Southwark Park Galleries, 2020) operate as monumental armatures that are simultaneously inhabited and animated by performers. These structures, paired with sound and performance, create immersive environments where human, nonhuman, and machine voices interlace.
Parali’s practice is deeply informed by caregiving, queerness, and embodied vulnerability. Projects such as The Children of the Future (Cooke Latham Gallery, 2024) weave together children’s voices, machine synthesis, and sculptural installation to explore futurity, belonging, and interdependence. Earlier works, including The Terrace of Lungs (2019), staged intimate performances combining text, song, choreography, and objects to dissolve fixed notions of identity and to foreground porous, communal ways of being.
Across her work, Parali cultivates a language of mythic speculation and poetics, producing hybrid forms that blur sculpture, theatre, and opera. By expanding voice into a haunting, material force, she positions art as a site for reimagining power through vulnerability, and belonging through care.