Anastasia Samoylova

JUN.01.2023 ── AUG.27.2023

Image Cities is an exhaustive and conscientious work, carried out in various locations, on the integration of photography and image in the urban environment. Samoylova renews the vision and language of documentary photography in a working process that she defends as artisanal: the images are juxtaposed, creating surprising visual effects in which the human figure is almost always absent and, if it appears at all, it does so on a minimal scale compared to the grandeur of buildings and advertisements. His images express the ambivalences and contradictions of today’s urban landscape: while cities try to promote their individuality, their spaces are moving towards a generic scenario in which the specific configuration of each city loses its singularity in an anonymous architecture of steel and glass.

Curator: Victoria del Val (Fundación MAPFRE).

Website

Outdoor display of 30 photographs from the Image Cities project.

Installation images by Manuel Carranza

https://www.centroniemeyer.es/events/event/image-cities-anastasia-samoylova/

February 16 - May 14, 2023

Fundación MAPFRE presents the exhibition Image Cities by the photographer Anastasia Samoylova. Image Cities represents the winning entry in the first edition of the KBr Photo Award launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021.

Image Cities, Anastasia Samoylova’s winning project, is a visual study of the increasing integration of the photographic image and the urban environment. Our cities are becoming collages. Lifestyle advertising, real-estate billboards, and hyper-photogenic architecture make city space feel like a fantasy stage set of ever-shifting scenery. International brands smother local history. Global capitalism imposes its visual order.

The exhibition is structured around 50 photographs selected from those that make up the project Image Cities, a body of work that acquires its full meaning as a series, as it is precisely that serial nature which makes the city and its individuality disappear. The persons visible in these urban settings walk along the streets with seeming indifference, almost invariably self-absorbed and located in front of large buildings and billboards featuring advertisements for new luxury real estate projects, fashionable perfumes and beauty products. In all these images - which are brightly colored and have crisp outlines as well as interplays of reflections and compositions structured through successions of planes - Samoylova emphasizes the monumental scale of the buildings and skyscrapers in relation to any other motif in the image.

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Read expanded essay by Victoria del Val

January 28 – May 4, 2023

Anastasia Samoylova scratches the flamboyant surface of an American dream in a place where the public image is characterized by beaches and palm trees, where pink flamingos romp in front of colorful buildings and alligators find their way into pools. On her photographic road trip through Florida, Samoylova shows the Sunshine State as a shimmering fantasy and subtropical dystopia that is equally marked by its deep political divide and by the impact of the climate crisis.

While investigating the sociocultural identity of the famous swing state, Samoylova shows how Florida is a symbol of the polarized politics of the United States and its complex past. Her pictures depict urban centers with their deceptive advertising and luxurious real estate as well as desolate areas and wild nature. She also makes portraits of the people she meets along the way, all of whom call Florida their home despite their differences. Samoylova’s works tell of colorful emptiness, bombastic materialism, and cultural artificiality, revealing incompatibility, existential threats, and dreariness. Her pictures track down numerous contradictions and challenge the many identities of Florida.

Against the background of this dichotomy of staged perception and reality, Samoylova employs strategies of commercial photography in her artistic practice to investigate topics such as environmental protection, consumerism, and the picturesque. Her photographic observations of everyday life link her work to legendary American photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans, who in their day also explored the country on road trips. As a photo artist of the present, she breathes new life into the typically American genre of road trip photography and imposes a female perspective on the genre’s predominantly male view of America.

With her colorful, collage-like details of reality, she transports the colorfulness of New Color Photography, which was once considered vulgar, into the present. Shown concurrently with the major retrospective of the work of color photography pioneer William Eggleston, C/O will present Anastasia Samoylova . Floridas from January 28 to May 4, 2023. Following the publication of her recent monograph on the subject by Steidl, this is the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

C/O Berlin Website

July 16–December 18, 2022

Installation images courtesy George Eastman Museum

Anastasia Samoylova’s photographs are deceptive, drawing us in with the promise of luxurious paradise then revealing a crumbling landscape that nature promises to reclaim. Yet this is what it is to live at the edge of climate change, as rising sea levels and hurricanes threaten the very spaces that are so prized. In her series FloodZone, Samoylova focuses on the southern United States, where the sought-after tropical climate drives the real estate market to continue to build upon land that is known to be slipping into the ocean.

Samoylova’s images are seductive and eerie. Their alluring color palette—lush greens, azure blues, and pastel pinks—gives way to minute details of decay: palm trees toppled over into a building, the patina of constant moisture eroding a freeway overpass, the boarded-up windows of a hotel after it has weathered another storm. The landscape in her work is riddled with advertisements promising a utopian dream, where swimming pools overlook the ocean, where everyone is tan and chiseled, and where nature is manicured. Somewhere between the artifice and the sobering reality lies the melancholy of life in the time of climate change.

The exhibition includes more than 60 photographs from Samoylova’s FloodZone project with additional photographs from the Eastman Museum collection selected collaboratively by the curator Jamie Allen and artist.

FloodZone

Anastasia Samoylova

Curated by Sarah Howard

January 13 – March 7, 2020

Video walkthrough

USF Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present FloodZone, the first solo museum exhibition of Moscow-born, Miami-based artist Anastasia Samoylova. Commissioned as a new installation of an ongoing photographic series by Samoylova, FloodZone reflects and responds to the immediate impacts of sea level rise in the Southern United States. Samoylova’s work explores how photography obscures reality and crafts perception by investigating the relationship among environmentalism, consumerism, and the picturesque, and by capturing the precarious psychological state of living in paradise sinking towards catastrophe. Her images bring to the surface the seductive and destructive dissonance between the saturation of the real estate industry’s marketing images of a tropical paradise offering water views, while properties and streets are regularly flooded with storm and sewer water. This new iteration and installation of FloodZone provides Samoylova an opportunity to generate new work and expand her project to focus on coastal communities in Florida’s Gulf Coast region.

Programs associated with the FloodZone exhibition will include a gallery talk with the artist; a panel discussion of the future impacts of sea-level rise, including artists and resiliency experts; and a book release and signing event with the artist at Oxford Exchange.

About USF Contemporary Art Museum

USF Contemporary Art Museum <http://cam.usf.edu/>

The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) organizes and presents significant and investigative exhibitions of contemporary art from Florida, the United States and around the world, including Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Exhibitions and educational programs are designed to introduce students, faculty and the community to current cultural trends. USFCAM also publishes relevant catalogues, schedules critically important traveling exhibitions, and underwrites new projects by artists emerging on national and international fronts. USFCAM maintains the university’s art collection, comprising more than 5,000 art works.

Exhibition view "Nach uns die Sintflut”, KUNST HAUS WIEN 2020

Photos: Rudolf Strobl

16.09.20-14.02.21

As a Green Museum, KUNST HAUS WIEN regularly dedicates major photographic presentations to key ecological themes. The main exhibition in autumn presents a selection of artistic positions that focus on the effects of climate change on the ecosystem. The works in the exhibition show and analyse the impact the global climate crisis has on glaciers, sea and marine regions, considering both scientific and political aspects. The images of disappearing glaciers, rising sea levels, increasingly acidified oceans and desertificated land areas are not least emotionally touching, and once again bear witness to the urgency of the topic.

Nach uns die Sintflut [After Us, the Flood] brings together current photographic and cinematic work by 21 international and domestic artists. Their works, often the result of extensive research and close collaborations with leading scientists, throw into relief the ecological effects our way of life has on different regions of the earth. Some also highlight its socio-political and social consequences, or outline future scenarios. The artists draw attention to people in those regions already most affected by the consequences of climate change, and illustrate the global connections between our lifestyle and the ecological, social and economic problems we face.

Some works appear to celebrate the beauty of nature, while others confront us with stark, unprettified images of destroyed landscapes and regions. An example of the latter is Axel Braun, who examines the history and alarming present of the Pasterze (Austria’s largest glacier, situated at the foot of the Grossglockner), and documents the dramatic melting of the glacier. Benedikt Partenheimer addresses permafrost as a climate indicator in his photo series Memories of the Future and warns of the dire global consequences of the impending thawing of frozen soils in Alaska. Angela Tiatia’s video installation is a meditative study of everyday life in the South Pacific island state of Tuvalu. The island, massively threatened by rising sea levels, represents all those regions of the world that are affected by floods. The work of Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick addresses the erosion of the riverbanks of the Ganges in his home country caused by climate change.

“Après moi le déluge! is the election cry of every capitalist and every capitalist nation,” writes Karl Marx in the first volume of Das Kapital (1867). The saying “Nach uns die Sintflut” [After Us, the Deluge] which lends the exhibition its title expresses our indifference towards the very real destruction of our environment, and calls out a pattern of behaviour that is only concerned with its own short-term profit, does not recognise systemic connections, and ignores its dramatic impact on the entire ecosystem.

By contrast, the works shown in Nach uns die Sintflut [After Us, the Flood] seek to encourage action. They give visual form to the often abstract and complex processes, and eco-systemic contexts involved. They illustrate facts, create visions and make abundantly clear that nothing less than the future of our planet is at stake.

Artists: Benoit Aquin, Ursula Biemann, Axel Braun, Solmaz Daryani, Verena Dengler, Michael Goldgruber, Justin Brice Guariglia, Stephan Huber, Genoveva Kriechbaum, Anouk Kruithof, Bénédicte Kurzen, Douglas Mandry, Benedikt Partenheimer, Sarker Protick, Gabriele Rothemann, Anastasia Samoylova, Christina Seely, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch, Frank Thiel, Angela Tiatia

Grand Canyons

The MBAL invited the Russian-born artist Anastasia Samoylova to create a new installation for the museum’s facade. Her mural piece evokes the Grand Canyon against the backdrop of climate change. For several years the artist, who now lives in the United States, has been creating monumental installations in parallel with her practice as a documentary photographer. Grand Canyons, created in 2021, is part of the Landscape Sublime series begun in 2013. In the series the artist explores the way in which images from social networks respond to popular pictorial motifs and illustrate a certain idea of nature and environment. To create her collages, Samoylova collects royalty-free images from the Internet and re-photographs them in the form of cubist paintings. Captured by amateur photographers, most of them are often majestic: the saturated colours and compositions correspond to the expected conventions of calendar-type tourist imagery. The artist uploads her images using keywords that then become the titles of her works. In her studio, she prints, then cuts, folds, and assembles the found views. Letting improvisation carry her compositions in a three-dimensional way, Samoylova is inspired by the work of the Russian avant-garde, in particular by the constructivist artist Liubov Popova. Her relationship to popular images is influenced by the Pop Art of Robert Rauschenberg and by postmodernism.

Grand Canyons consists of typical views of the famous landscapes of the American West, as well as historical photographs from the Grand Canyon National Park online library, from images of hiking trails and hilltop vistas to those of tour groups and native animals. Both the park’s official archives and images shared on social medias contain photographs of wildfires that have occurred in recent years. As the fire season increases in length each year due to climate change, the growing number of fire images uploaded to the internet is a silent reminder of what could be lost if land use continues at the same rate. Samoylova’s work thus explores notions of environmentalism, consumerism and the picturesque. With the series Landscape Sublime, she looks at one of the most pressing issues of this century: climate change. Her images’ composition captures the state of a nature that is sinking towards catastrophe and reveals the role that photography plays in creating collective memories and imaginary geographies.

Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents ‘FloodZone’, an exhibition by Anastasia Samoylova.

After moving to Miami, Anastasia Samoylova began photographing the city and its surroundings. With these images the ‘FloodZone’ project began, as a visual exploration of the amazing paradoxes, contradictions and contrasts that abound in South Florida. In the pictures of Anastasia Samoylova, Miami looks like a studio set: sun-faded advertisement banners inviting you to the city of dreams, skyscrapers and shacks with mould-eaten façades, the abundant, lush vegetation with roots gnawing away at the city, bright contrasting colours of the land and houses, and water, water, water… ‘Although we are surrounded by the ocean, there is almost no ocean in the photos. The water in these pictures comes to the streets and flows through them, as if through the veins of the city. It penetrates the walls, penetrates all the surfaces,’ says the photographer. (…)

The project ‘FloodZone’ makes you take a sober look at things and think about responsibility. In this case about the responsibility of politicians and developers with their cheerful encouragement to settle in a ‘paradise’ that is defenceless before the natural elements. In a global sense, this is the responsibility of humanity to subsequent generations who may never see cities that have sunk underwater, animals and plants that have disappeared from the face of the earth due to global warming. - Anna Zaytseva

Watch the online gallery visit of the exhibition here (In Dutch)

FloodZone is Anastasia Samoylova’s photographic account of life on the climatic knife-edge of the southern United States. Sea levels are rising and hurricanes threaten, but this is not a visualisation of disaster or catastrophe. These beautifully subtle and often unsettling images capture the mood of waiting, of knowing the climate is changing, of living with it. The color palette is tropical: lush greens, azure blues, pastel pinks. But the mood is pensive and melancholy. As new luxury high-rises soar, their foundations are in water. Crumbling walls carry images of tourist paradise. In the heat and humidity nature threatens to return the place to tangled wilderness. Liquid permeates Samoylova’s urban scenes and unexpected views: waves, ripples, puddles, pools, splashes and spray. Water is everywhere and water is the problem. Mixing lyric documentary, gently staged photos and epic aerial vistas, FloodZone crosses boundaries to express the deep contradictions of the place.

More info

Anastasia Samoylova

FloodZone

27.6.—22.8.2020

Anastasia Samoylova zog 2016 nach Miami, eine Stadt, die unmittelbar vom Ansteigen des Meeresspiegels bedroht ist. Tropische Farben, sattes Grün, azurnes Blau und pastelliges Rosa dominieren ihre Fotografien ebenso wie das einzigartige Licht der Stadt, deren Hitze und Feuchtigkeit man zu spüren glaubt.

Doch die Stimmung in diesen Bildern ist nachdenklich. Zerbröckelnde Mauern kontrastieren mit Bildern des Touristenparadieses, der boomende Immobilienmarkt setzt auf luxuriöse Apartmenthäuser mit Blick aufs Meer, während die Wildnis sich an unerwarteten Orten Bahn bricht. Hurrikans sind an der Tagesordnung, und überall ist Wasser. Wellen, Pfützen, Pools und Gischt prägen auch Anastasia Samoylovas urbane Szenen und unerwartete Ansichten: Ihre elegant-subtilen und oft beunruhigenden Bilder fangen auf besondere Weise den prekären Zustand des Lebens am Rande des Untergangs ein.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA

FloodZone

June 18 - September 26, 2020

Curator: Verónica Flom

Click here to watch: Anastasia Samoylova on FloodZone, her solo show at Dot Fiftyone Gallery

Click here to watch: Conversation between Ximena Caminos (curator and Founder of HoneyLab), Kate Fleming (Director of Bridge Initiative) and artist Anastasia Samoylova, moderated by Verónica Flom (curator of Dot Fiftyone Gallery). (August 4, 2020)

Dot Fiftyone is delighted to announce Anastasia Samoylova’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Comprising a substantial selection of works from her acclaimed photographic project FloodZone, the exhibition presents a sharp and poetic observation of the impacts of sea level rise in the Southern United States. Featured in The New Yorker, Bloomberg, El País, Washington Post, Collector Daily,The New York Review of Books, among other key publications, the book of the project, with over 80 images, was released by Steidl in 2019.

Anastasia Samoylova’s subtle sensitivity and incisive wit inform her unique way of looking at one of most urgent issues of the 21st Century: climate change. Her engagement with water is what ultimately determines the sense of her work. The artist moves through natural and urban spaces, picking out eerie details that remind us of the possibility of an imminent catastrophe, or pointing to climate-related gentrification and the pushing out of local communities. The result is a singular portrait of the region, which captures its ambiguous essence as a heavenly but fragile and uncertain geography.

Pastel-painted walls, advertisements in construction sites, desolate landscapes after rain or a hurricane, and idyllic summer pools hint at the complexities beneath the official picturesque iconography. Mixing lyric documentary, gently staged photos and epic aerial views, FloodZone depicts the shoreline between growth and destruction, pleasure and collapse. Samoylova’s work defies any categorization of environmental photography or eco-photography. Instead, it is a critical yet heartfelt response to the precariousness of artificial paradises and the imminence of disaster, and a metaphor for a society that is ready for a change. In a moment characterized by crucial events, addressing climate change is not only a path of resistance, but also a combat to safeguard and protect our future.