"Anastasia Samoylova. Harbor" exhibition in Turin

Gallerie d'Italia - Turin presents Anastasia Samoylova. Harbor, an exhibition curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera and open to the public from 22 October 2026 to 7 February 2027.

Samoylova pursues her own photographic analysis, revealing the soul of seven European port cities: Genoa, Venice, Rotterdam, Marseille, Lisbon, Athens and Istanbul. “Photography is a medium that compresses time and space into a single frame,” says the artist. Time and space are key elements in the composition of a photograph, just as they are in the development of port cities

Ports are structural spaces that have evolved in time and space. They are a nexus of transformations, intersections, dynamism, contradictions, inclusions and exclusions, wealth and poverty, past, present and future. They are places of temporal and spatial transition, characterised by unstoppable commercial expansion, the threat of climatic instability, the challenges of migration and the vastness of visual saturation. 

Samoylova captures this euphoria of sounds, colours, shapes, shadows, light, solids and voids with her camera, offering a rather unique glimpse of the ports she has chosen. With the kaleidoscopic vision that sets her work apart, which conveys the subject through the overlapping of various visual layers, her pictures invite us to pause, to look closely and to take the time needed to observe them. 

Working within a documentary tradition, the photographer creates images that are both conceptually rigorous and visually poetic. The work resists instantaneous consumption, instead rewarding prolonged engagement through layers of observation, ambiguity and meaning. 

Anastasia Samoylova (1984-) is an American artist whose work moves across photography, painting, and installation. Working between observational imagery and studio-based intervention, she has established a singular practice that examines how contemporary life is shaped, mediated, and mythologized through images. Her work engages the entanglement of environmental crisis, consumer spectacle, and political imagination, revealing the tensions between surface and structure, seduction and instability, reality and representation.

Samoylova’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; the Saatchi Gallery, London; C/O Berlin; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid and Barcelona; the Nasher Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; and the Chrysler Museum of Art; among others.

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among others.