October 16th 2026 - January 10th, 2027
While disaster photography often relies on images of sudden, spectacular destruction, Anastasia Samoylova deliberately avoids these visual clichés. Her photographic expression instead generates a form of low-level dread. Across her coastal imagery, a crucial distinction emerges between ‘weather,’ referring to immediate phenomena such as storms, rainfall, and flooding, and ‘climate,’ which operates both as a longer environmental condition and as a psychological atmosphere reflecting a collective state of mind.
For instance, Floridas (2016–2021) captures the tense atmosphere of a hyper-politicized era. Within her work, these two threads of weather and psychological climate are constantly intertwined. This prevents us from simply staring at the ruins, moving us instead to imagine a sustainable future amid ecological crisis. She uses seductive, pastel-toned color to picture a landscape in which beauty and denial coexist. The resulting tension slows down our viewing and complicates the seductions of the image. Viewed alongside this project is the landmark FloodZone (2016–2019), which examines the slow, everyday realities of flooding, sea-level rise, speculative development, and climate vulnerability in South Florida and adjacent areas.
The two series expand upon this environmental critique by treating Florida as a microcosm of the nation, utilizing icons like pink flamingos, abandoned architecture, and brightly colored churches to lay out a complex social and political landscape.
Romanticizing the end of the world hinders our imagination of the future. Samoylova demonstrated a clear resistance early in her career through Landscape Sublime (2013 to Present). By printing online stock images of landscapes, sculpting them into studio installations, and re-photographing them, she actively disrupts the generic and standardized views of nature that saturate our screens. The cornerstone of this exhibition, Image Cities (2021–2022), developed across seventeen global metropolises with the support of the inaugural KBr Photo Award. Critiquing the flattening of local cultures, she traveled solo across 17 global metropolises listed by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, including London, Paris, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Madrid. Using a telephoto lens, reflections, and spatial compression, Samoylova brings advertisements, architecture, pedestrians, and local motifs into dense, layered compositions. While her observations expand globally, they resonate deeply in Taiwan today by showing how corporate imagery occupies local spaces. As standardized visuals increasingly dominate our own streets, Samoylova’s work serves as an urgent mirror, inviting us to look deeper, far beyond the comfort of the commercial facade. In light of that, how can we actively and courageously imagine our future world? This is a question for us all to ponder.
