“Erik Kessels. Un’immagine” exhibition opens at Gallerie d’Italia – Turin

10 September 2025

Intesa Sanpaolo presents the exhibition “ERIK KESSELS. UN’IMMAGINE” at the Gallerie d’Italia – Turin, featuring an installation by Dutch visual artist Erik Kessels. The work is created from over 60,000 photographs from the Intesa Sanpaolo Publifoto Archive.

The images have been transformed with the aid of artificial intelligence into a single photograph in constant motion, producing a fluid portrait where people and events that shaped Italy merge and dissolve into a flowing mass.

Kessels, an artist, curator and communication designer from the Netherlands, is internationally recognised as a leading figure in the field of “vernacular photography.” Rather than taking new photographs, he assembles pre-existing images and reuses them as elements in a visual mosaic.

The immersive room at the museum in Turin is then transformed into a visual and musical theatre, thanks to an original soundtrack specially composed by avant-garde electronic musicians Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) and Stefano Pilia.

The Intesa Sanpaolo Publifoto Archive contains more than 7 million analogue photographs taken between the 1930s and 1980s by the Publifoto photojournalism agency, a key player in Italian journalism that documented news, politics, society and culture.

Acquired in 2015 by Intesa Sanpaolo, the Archive is now an extraordinary repository of collective memory, fully accessible to the public through the interactive installation Archivio Vivo, which allows digital consultation of the materials.

The museum in Turin, together with those in Milan, Naples and Vicenza, is part of the Gallerie d’Italia museum project by Intesa Sanpaolo.

The exhibition is open to the public from 11 September to 7 October 2025. More information is available on the Gallerie d’Italia website.

Photo credits: “Un’immagine” © Erik Kessels, 2025