Coverbild Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova
Image Cities
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Texts by: David Campany, Victoria del Val
Artist: Anastasia Samoylova
Institution: Fundación MAPFRE
English
March 2023 , 168 Pages
Hardcover
246mm x 308mm
ISBN: 978-3-7757-5480-4
Press download
| Reinventing the Image of the Global Metropolis
Image Cities takes us on a journey through cities the Globalization and World Cities Research Network ranks highest according to their degree of “global interconnectedness.” We find them in a process of transformation concealed behind dummy façades onto which a sense of heightened anticipation has been projected. It would be tempting to read these photographs as a polemic against the triumph of consumerism and a slowly numbing global visual-economic order that wraps itself around whatever once felt local and civic. Samoylova’s photography is full of masterful refinements of the existing clichés of urban photography: Citizens dwarfed by giant images. Faces and bodies refracted through glass. The Pop-Cubism of visual bricolage. The minuscule human figures that stroll seemingly indifferent through city space while being at least partly somewhere else in their imaginations― their existence already a collage of places and times. Yet, Samoylova consciously engages with cliché, takes it apart and reassembles it, gambling that it can be taken to a level of pictorial sophistication that eludes any simple argument or statement. Instead, she invites us to reflect on photography’s role in the creation of a gap between these citie’s brand identity and their everyday reality.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA (*1984) grew up in Moscow. In 2008 she moved to the United States, where she graduated with a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Art from Bradley University, Illinois. Her work explores the tension between the staged perception of a bombastic materialism and reality. Living and working in Miami, Florida has become the backdrop for her combination of collage-like details with the genre of the road trip. Her recent series Flood Zones and Floridas have received great critical acclaim.
EXHIBITION
Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, Spain,
February 16–May 14, 2023
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