"Erik Kessels. Un'immagine" exhibition in Turin

Le Gallerie d'Italia - Turin presents “Un'immagine” (An image), a video installation by artist Erik Kessels, open to the public from 11 September to 7 October 2025.

UN'IMMAGINE is the latest work by visual artist Erik Kessels (Netherlands), made up of thousands of pictures from Intesa Sanpaolo Publifoto Archive, all “stitched together” and “transformed” to create a single photograph in constant motion. With this work, Erik Kessels merges together an entire archive, giving life to a metamorphic blob from which a fluid portrait of Italy emerges, populated by the faces of people, pictures from the news, of war, of workers, of politics, sport and snippets of history, each one penetrating the space of the other. The archive takes the shape of a multiform organic magma in this video installation, revealing and dissolving the complexity of the people and events that have made Italy. In this 360° audio and visual experience, visitors will be surprised by the changing content of the entire archive and by the possibility to immerse themselves in a human archive projected in giant form.  Viewers can move around the room to capture the details of a multifocal story. The Dutch artist intervenes with a post-modern narrative that uses the contemporary language of artificial intelligence, moving away from every chronological story to delve fully into a unique and high-impact vision of other people’s - often anonymous - lives. For several weeks, the Immersive Room at Gallerie d'Italia - Turin will become an uninterrupted visual and instrumental theatre in which our present, the past, the world and life emerge through a soundtrack in which the mystic and the electronic alternate, fizzing and dissolving. The musical theme has been created specifically by Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) and Stefano Pilia, British and Italian electronic musicians at the forefront in the contemporary experimental music scene.

Intesa Sanpaolo’s Publifoto Archive contains a heritage of 7 million analogue photos taken between the 1930s and 90s by the Publifoto photojournalism agency. The pictures capture the most significant moments of over half a century of news, social and society events, sport, entertainment and culture, in Italy and throughout the world. Negatives, prints, proofs and slides constantly being studied, restored, filed, digitised and published online.

Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, curator and communication designer with a profound interest in art and photography. In a career that has spanned more than 25 years, Kessels has consolidated his position as a leading and unquestionable point of reference in the field of what we call “vernacular photography”. Instead of taking new pictures, for most of his projects he assembles pre-existing photographs and reuses them as tiles to compose his own mosaic. He is an artist without a camera and without a lens: in his practice, photography is a ready-made element to be sampled and recontextualised. The result is a sort of ecosystem of images.