Linda Fregni Nagler. Anger Pleasure Fear

Within the sphere of Third Resonance, from 29 October 2025 to 1 March 2026, the GAM – Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Turin presents the first anthological exhibition in an Italian institution to be devoted to Linda Fregni Nagler (Stockholm, 1976) curated by Cecilia Canziani.

The artist uses the photographic medium, interweaving research, collecting activities and an in-depth investigation of the material nature of the image. Her practice reflects on iconographic conventions, on visual clichés and on the use of anonymous images, constructing narrative devices capable of generating new reflections on the present.
In isolating and conserving fragments of the visible, the photographic images tell the story of the gaze: they offer evidence not only of what they show, but also of the different ways in which we have observed the world over time. In photography, presence and absence, visible and invisible pursue each other, making each image a place of reflection, memory and imagination.
The exhibition, built around works realized over the course of over twenty years, brings together different cycles in a single story, establishing a dialogue between works that are distant in time yet capable, through the material nature of the photograph, of rendering a poetic fresco of the 20th century: a long night illuminated by brief flashes of enchantment and beauty that accompanies us to our own time.
Anger Pleasure Fear is structured starting from the ideal dialogue between two works: The Hidden Mother, presented for the first time at the 2013 Venice Biennale – an installation composed of 997 daguerreotypes, cartes de visite and tintypes, in which the visible subject, a child, conceals the hidden subject, the mother, present but wrapped in a cloth – and Vater (Father), a previously unpublished series specially realized for the occasion, devoted to the Mensur, a ritual duel practised by student brotherhoods in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, where the scars displayed are a sign of courage and distinction. This practice still continues to exist, transforming itself from a rite of passage to a symbol of the endless violence that traversed the past century and that characterizes our own time.

Around this central core, the exhibition itinerary winds its way around other works, including Pour commander à l'air (MAXXI Prize 2014), enlargements of photographs taken from news reports that, now freed from the text and the context, become resignifiable materials, placing the narrative value of documentary images in question. The ambiguous relationship with modernity is present in the ongoing series Untitled, photographic prints realized starting from sketches reproducing photographic originals of objects associated with the world of work, or mysterious architectures of which we no longer know the use, and in the series of prints Smokes, clouds, explosions taken from the artist's collection of slides for magic lantern that forms the basis of the performance Things that Death Cannot Destroy.

Also on display are works from her early period, such as Non voglio uccidere nessuno [I Don't Want to Kill Anybody], which seem to anticipate some of the themes and in-depth reflections that are to be found in this exhibition and Playgrounds, and the new series Little History of Subjugation, which investigates the ambiguity of the relationship between humans and animals, only apparently reconciled. The exhibition also includes a work created in collaboration with physicist Michael Doser: a glass plate hand-coated with a silver-salt gelatin emulsion, following a recipe by the pioneer of photography Hercule Florence, exposed to a flow of antiprotons, which bears witness to the existence of antimatter.

Through the act of collecting, observing and reinterpreting images, Linda Fregni Nagler invites us to explore the changeable boundaries between document and vision, memory and imagination, making the photograph not only the object, but the subject of thought.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Cecilia Canziani, Geoff Dyer, Luisella Farinotti, Federico Nicolao and Dieter Roelstraete and published by Quodlibet... read the rest of the article»