Saatchi Gallery announces its winter season of major exhibitions, ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA: ADAPTATION and AS WE RISE: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE BLACK ATLANTIC.
Both shows will run simultaneously from 5 November 2024 to 20 January 2025. Admission to both exhibitions is ticketed. One ticket grants entry to see both ADAPTATION and AS WE RISE for a price usually reserved for a single exhibition ticket.
ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA: ADAPTATION
Saatchi Gallery & Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography are proud to present ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA: ADAPTATION, the first major survey of contemporary American photographer Anastasia Samoylova. Curated by Taous Dahmani, this exhibition will present works from five of Samoylova’s most significant series: ‘Landscape Sublime’, ‘Image Cities’, ‘FloodZone’, ‘Floridas’, and ‘Breakfasts’. The exhibition features compelling video work previously unseen in the UK.
In ADAPTATION, Samoylova directs her frank and curious gaze at evidence of the environment adapting to human intervention and, correspondingly, at our social and political resistance to respond to a rapidly changing planet. Her subjects – often pastel-hued, doused in refracting light and darkened by impenetrable shadow – speak to this push and pull. Viewers are lured to take a closer look; subtly challenged to consider the ways in which we are encroaching on the environment and alerted to the danger of denial.
The accompanying book, published by Thames & Hudson, will be available to purchase in the Gallery Shop and Saatchi Store online.
ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA: ADAPTATION has been produced by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis/Paris/Lausanne in collaboration with Saatchi Gallery, London.
About Anastasia Samoylova
Anastasia Samoylova is a Russian-born American artist who alternates between observational photography and studio practice. In 2024, her exhibition, ‘Floridas: Anastasia Samoylova and Walker Evans,’ will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Recent exhibitions include C/O Berlin, Fundación MAPFRE, George Eastman Museum, Chrysler Museum of Art, and V&A Dundee. Samoylova’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Publications include FloodZone (Steidl, 2019), Floridas (Steidl, 2022), and Image Cities (Fundación Mapfre, 2023).
About Taous R. Dahmani
Taous R. Dahmani is a historian, researcher and writer specialising in photography. Dahmani is based between London, England and Marseille, France. Dahmani is editor and content advisor at The Eyes, a trustee of the Photo Oxford Festival and on the editorial board of MAI: Visual Culture and Feminism. In 2022, Dahmani contributed a chapter about Polareyes, a magazine by and for Black British women photographers, in Resist, Organize, Build (SUNY Press, 2022), and served as the curator of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France.
About The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography
An independent non-profit organization, The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP) produces unique and influential museum-quality photography exhibitions and circulates them around the world. The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (Minneapolis/ Paris/Lausanne) aims to enlighten, delight, and inspire people around the world through the presentation of photography exhibitions, publications, related online content, symposia, lectures, and other forms of educational events and materials. Founded in 2003, FEP is based in Minneapolis, a city with a vibrant tradition of support for the arts. The organization has achieved substantial results in its first two decades, with shows travelling to 35 countries on 4 continents, and with catalogues produced in many different languages.
AS WE RISE: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE BLACK ATLANTIC
Saatchi Gallery is proud to present AS WE RISE: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE BLACK ATLANTIC, an exciting exhibition of photographs from African Diasporic culture. Organised by Aperture and curated by Elliott Ramsey, the exhibition showcases work by Black artists from Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, the United States, and the continent of Africa.
The exhibition celebrates the expansive sensibility of the works in the Wedge Collection, Canada’s largest privately-owned collection committed to championing Black artists, established by Dr. Kenneth Montague in 1997. Centring the familial alongside the familiar, the exhibition embraces concepts of community, identity, and power, and recognize the complex strength, beauty, vulnerability, and irreducibility of Black life. The exhibition features such established names as Horace Ové, James Barnor and Gordon Parks, as well as emerging talents such as Texas Isaiah and Arielle Bobb-Willis.
The accompanying book, published by Aperture, will be available to purchase in the Gallery Shop and Saatchi Store online.
AS WE RISE: PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE BLACK ATLANTIC, selections from the Wedge Collection, is organized by Aperture and curated by Elliott Ramsey.
About Elliott Ramsey
Elliott Ramsey is Curator of The Polygon Gallery. Ramsey holds a Master of Arts in Comparative Media Arts (2015) from Simon Fraser University. Ramsey is an alumnus of the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Professional Alliance for Curators of Colour, and has sat on numerous panels, advisories, and art juries including the Sobey Award, VIVA Award, Portfolio Prize, and Capture Photography Festival, among various other committees.
About the Wedge Collection
The Wedge Collection was started in 1997 by Dr. Kenneth Montague to acquire and exhibit art that explores Black identity. In addition to the Wedge Collection, Montague founded Wedge Curatorial Projects, a non-profit arts organization that helps support emerging Black artists. A Toronto-based art collector, Montague has been a member of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s board of trustees since 2015 and has served on the African acquisitions committee at Tate Modern, London, as well as on the photography curatorial committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From our base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through our acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.