At the MAO of Turin, Linda Fregni Nagler's exhibition and the Japan of flower sellers

From December 5, 2024 to May 4, 2025, the MAO Museum of Oriental Art in Turin presents Hanauri. The Japan of Flower Sellers, a new exhibition that invites visitors to discover Japan through the interpretation of artist Linda Fregni Nagler (Stockholm, 1976). In this project, which is part of the Japanese gallery’s larger program of renovation of its permanent collections, the artist explores a range of symbols and traditions related to the world of nature and the flower trade that are deeply rooted in Japanese culture. The exhibition addresses his meticulous approach of selecting and collecting, reworking and reactivating Japanese photographs from the Yokohama School (Yokohama Shashin). The original photographs, collected over a period of two decades by the artist and offered in the exhibition at MAO for the first time, are juxtaposed with works by Linda Fregni Nagler, who rephotographed the original albumins, printing them in a darkroom and coloring them by hand with a technique similar to that of the period between 1860 and 1910. The subject investigated at MAO is that of flower sellers (hanauri), a popular category of peddlers (bōtefuri) in Japan of the Edo and Meiji periods.

The exhibition project aims to contextualize and explore the link between Fregni Nagler’s photographs and woodcut prints from before the birth of photography. On display will be 26 mid-nineteenth-century albumins from the Fregni Nagler collection, along with six large silver salt prints hand-colored by the artist and four glass positives visible through two viewers. Placed alongside the works are three woodcuts that decry the iconography of flower sellers: the depiction of the spring months-the illustration of the month of April by Utagawa Kunisada, from the Oriental Museum in Venice; At the Entrance to the Temple of Kanda by Koikawa Harumachi from the E. Chiossone Oriental Museum in Genoa; and Toyokuni III by Utagawa Kunisada, from the series Six Sellers in Summer Evenings, from a private collection. The floral and plant theme also finds further declination in the precious kesa textiles from the MAO’s collection, dating back to the Edo period, and in the kimonos that enrich the exhibition, one from Palazzo Madama and two specimens from the Museo d’Arte Orientale in Venice, as well as three fine lacquers and three kakemonos signed Yanagisawa Kien, Kawamura Bunpō and Tomioka Tessai on loan from a private collection. The refurbishment of the Japanese gallery is intended to stimulate new reflections and narratives around the Museum’s heritage; Hanauri is also part of the #MAOtempopresente project, which uses contemporary art as a means of interpreting and enhancing the collections through the inclusion of contemporary works and site-specific productions created within the residency program active since 2022.

In parallel to the exhibition project in the galleries, the collection’s three Japanese suits of armor, dating from the late 17th to the first half of the 19th century, have been remounted in the Mazzonis Salon, where they will undergo a conservation restoration open to the public from January 2025.

Notes on the artist

Linda Fregni Nagler is an artist who works primarily with the medium of photography. She was born in Stockholm and lives in Milan, where she graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2000. Her work is a search for the origins of the modern gaze and focuses on the photographic medium and its history, through a practice that weaves together the characteristics of the artist’s work, those of the scholar and the collector. His studio is, even before being a place of production, a place of reception where, after a path of meticulous selection and collection, photographs converge to be reworked and reactivated, thus taking on new meanings. His area of interest ranges from theory to the materiality of the photographic image, from the history of photography to the study of iconographic conventions and visual clichés, from the anonymous and vernacular image to appropriation as a contemporary art practice. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 55. Venice Biennale, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, 2013, curated by Massimiliano Gioni; in Italian institutions (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna Roma, MAXXI Roma, Fondazione Olivetti Roma, Triennale Milano, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Torino) and foreign ones (Moderna Museet Stockholm, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Columbia University NY, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg). Alongside artistic production, she has cultivated a practice of historical research that led her to develop, from 2012 to 2017, a project on the pioneer of photography Hercule Florence and consequently, to curate, together with Cristiano Raimondi, the exhibition Hercule Florence, Le Nouveau Robinson at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. In 2007 he received the New York Prize from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Columbia University. In 2008 she won a residency at the Dena Foundation in Paris, in 2014 she was awarded a residency at Iaspis (Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Program for Visual Artists) in Stockholm, and in 2016 she won the ACACIA Prize. Linda Fregni Nagler is a tenured lecturer in Photography at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and teaches Photography: theories and techniques at IULM University in Milan.

At the MAO of Turin, Linda Fregni Nagler's exhibition and the Japan of flower sellers

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