Contemporary photography in Turin with “Anastasia Samoylova. Harbor”
21 October 2026
Intesa Sanpaolo presents “Anastasia Samoylova. Harbor” at Gallerie d’Italia – Turin. One of the most influential voices in contemporary photography, Samoylova presents in this exhibition a new body of work exploring ports as places where the dynamics of global trade, transformations of the urban landscape, and the relationships between human activity and the environment intersect.
In her photographs, created as part of an original commission by Intesa Sanpaolo, Samoylova captures the distinctive character of seven European port cities: Genoa, Venice, Rotterdam, Marseille, Lisbon, Athens and Istanbul.
While maintaining a connection to the documentary tradition, the artist creates images that are both conceptually rigorous and visually poetic, highlighting the dual nature of ports as both physical infrastructures and constantly evolving landscapes, where the consequences of globalization and the tensions between economic development, technological innovation, and the memory of place become visible.
Samoylova also turns her attention to the people who inhabit these spaces: workers engaged in maintaining vessels bring visibility to the essential activities that keep ports running, while cruise ship passengers reveal the tourist-oriented character of contemporary waterfronts.
Behind the apparent efficiency and appeal of these spaces lie stories of precarious labor, migration, and the social transformations that accompany their development.
The exhibition features more than 60 works by the artist and is curated by Emanuela Mazzonis di Pralafera. It is the first solo exhibition in Italy by the Russian-American artist.
Gallerie d’Italia – Turin is part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia museum network, which also includes museums in Milan, Naples and Vicenza.
The exhibition is open to the public from 22 October 2026 to 7 February 2027. For further information, please visit the Gallerie d’Italia website.
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.
The exhibition is part of a broader programme dedicated to photography, which includes “Luca Campigotto. Wandering Europe”, also on view concurrently at Gallerie d’Italia – Turin. While distinct in their approaches, the two projects share an ability to use photography to portray places not merely as landscapes, but as spaces where history, memory, and contemporary transformations intersect.
Last updated 21 October 2026 at 13:15:09
