Olivia Arthur

Olivia Arthur's work explores themes of gender, intimacy, the human body and physicality, as well as cultural influences from East and West. She studied mathematics at the University of Oxford and photojournalism at the London College of Printing before moving to Delhi in 2003, where she began her career as a photographer. Her first books, Jeddah Diary (2012) and Stranger (2015), document the daily lives of young women in Saudi Arabia and the story of a shipwreck in Dubai. Moving into large-format portraiture, Olivia Arthur began examining the human relationship with the body, physicality, and the relationship between the body and technology. This work became her third book, Murmurings of the Skin, published in 2024. She is the co-founder of Fishbar, a publishing house and exhibition space dedicated to photography in London. Her most recent books, A Pocket of Their Own Shape and Lee and the Sea Things (both 2025), experiment with new photographic techniques in the form of double exposures and collage. She is a member of Magnum Photos and served as its president from 2020 to 2022.

Two of his projects are currently on display in Pordenone: in the new exhibition space of the Mercati Culturali Pordenone, he presents a journey through five editorial projects he has created over the years; while in the historical exhibition space of the Museo Civico d’Arte Ricchieri exhibits Murmurings of the Skin, a work that explores the relationship with the body, the skin, and physicality, also investigating the boundary between human and machine-technology, with the skin as a site of internal struggles, wounds, and resistance.