MADRID.- Sabrina Amrani is presenting FloodZone, Anastasia Samoylova‘s first exhibition in Spain. The title of the show is borrowed from her eponymous project started in 2016, a photographic series in which the artist seeks to respond to the environmental changes on coastal cities of South Florida.

The project is built upon a set of interrelated paradoxes: the seductive and destructive dissonance between the official iconography of the region, comprised by tourist and real estate advertising, and the stark daily realities of climate change; the ways of landscape and the sense of place are at once natural and constructed; and the way photography both records and crafts perception.

Although the project was prompted by the effects of a major hurricane, FloodZone avoids the over-familiar media imagery of ruin and disaster. Instead, there are photographs of the saturated topography, portraits of locals, and close-up observations of architecture, abundant flora and fauna. Samoylova’s images provide a broad yet acute perspective on what it feels like to live in at-risk areas while economic forces instill a sense of denial and disavowal. Her subject is the precarious psychological state experienced by those living in a paradise sinking towards catastrophe.

By playing self-consciously with the familiar motifs and palette of the region, her photographs work as complex allegories. They pick out scenes, situations and details that compress multiple meanings and implications, bringing to the surface the many ways in which the fate and self-understanding of South Florida is bound up with its self-image. For Samoylova, photography is key in the making and remaking of collective memories and imagined geographies. FloodZone is a contemplation of this, at a moment of significant transition.

Floodzone has been featured in key publications as The New Yorker, Artforum and El País. The project is completed with a book, that was published by Steidl in 2019.

Anastasia Samoylova (born 1984, Moscow; lives and works in Miami) moves between observational photography, studio practice and installation. Samoylova’s work is not about disaster and catastrophe. She explores and evidence the complex relationship between the nature and human society. Her photography plays around the collective memories and the narratives of geography.

This present year, Samoylova’s work will be shown in solo exhibitions at The Chrysler Museum of Art, The Print Center Philadelphia, and HistoryMiami Museum, among others. In 2020, she had her first solo museum exhibition of the ongoing project FloodZone at USF Contemporary Art Museum (Tampa, USA).

Her work was also presented at the Biennale for Contemporary Photography in Germany, at Pérez Art Museum in Miami (USA); at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago (USA) and at Aperture Foundation in NYC (USA), to name a few.

Anastasia Samoylova’s work is present in private and institutional collections such as the Perez Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago and Art Slant Collection in Paris, among others.

Samoylova received her MFA from Bradley University and MA in Environmental Design from the Russian State University for the Humanities.