Image: Anastasia Samoylova, Passengers on Cruise Ship, Istanbul, Turkey, 2026. © Anastasia Samoylova
Gallerie d'Italia in Turin is presenting "Anastasia Samoylova. Harbor", a photographic exhibition curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera, open to the public from 22 October 2026 to 7 February 2027. On the evening of the preview, 21 October, the museum is hosting an #INSIDE talk and book signing in which the photographer is joined by the curator and Mirjam Kooiman.
"Harbor" explores the character of seven European port cities: Genoa, Venice, Rotterdam, Marseille, Lisbon, Athens and Istanbul. Samoylova describes photography as a medium that compresses time and space into a single frame, and the museum points out that time and space are equally central to the way port cities develop.
According to the exhibition text, ports are structural spaces shaped over time, sites of transformation and intersection where wealth and poverty, inclusion and exclusion, past, present and future meet. They are marked by relentless commercial expansion, by the threat of climate instability, by the difficulties of migration and by an overwhelming saturation of images.
Samoylova records this mix of sounds, colours, forms, light and shadow through what the museum calls a kaleidoscopic way of seeing, building each image from several overlapping visual layers. While keeping a link to the documentary tradition, her photographs aim to be both conceptually rigorous and visually poetic, and to resist quick consumption in favour of slow, attentive looking. The museum illustrates the exhibition with "Passengers on Cruise Ship, Istanbul, Turkey" (2026).
Samoylova is an American artist working across photography, painting and installation. Moving between documentary images and studio-based interventions, her practice examines how contemporary life is shaped, mediated and mythologised through images, touching on environmental crisis, consumer spectacle and political imagery. She has had solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Norton Museum of Art, the Saatchi Gallery in London, C/O Berlin and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid and Barcelona, among others, and her work is held by collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
A photobook accompanying the exhibition is published by Allemandi.
