New FIAP Event at IFSAK
Photography Exhibition Name of the Exhibition: “Alla Luce di Napoli” “In The Light of Naples”
Photography Artist: Mr. Giampiero Assumma
Opening Ceremony: Thursday, March 26th, 2026, 16:00
Duration of Exhibition: 26th March – 09 April 2026
In this exhibition, organized by the İFSAK International Relations Unit, we hosted Italian photographerGiampiero Assumma.
Giampiero Assumma was with us at the exhibition opening, which was organized with the contributions of the Italian Cultural Center and Com.It.Es Istanbul.
About Exhibition
“Alla Luce di Napoli”
For Giampiero Assumma, Naples is not merely a geographical origin but a visual condition. It is a way of seeing shaped by permanent exposure to contrast — not as a sequence of opposites, but as their simultaneous coexistence. In this suspended space, beauty and decay, paradise and hell, devotion and fatalism unfold on the same fragile surface.
The South, in Assumma’s view, inhabits every image he produces, regardless of where it is made. Naples becomes a form of “sentimental education, ”a visual apprenticeship forged through the daily experience of tension without resolution. There is no catharsis here, no clear separation between darkness and light. Instead, opposites confront one another continuously, locked in a silent negotiation.
Assumma’s photography seeks to measure these instants — almost to count them — tracing the fleeting moments in which contradictions recognize each other. His images do not dramatize conflict; they hold it in suspension. Light functions not as illumination alone, but as a structural and symbolic element that defines the fragile equilibrium between forces.
Distance from Naples has become an essential part of this process. Living and working abroad, the artist transforms displacement into a vantage point. From afar, the forms embedded in Southern culture — faith, superstition, ritual, theatricality, religiosity — can be examined, questioned, and reconfigured. What emerges is neither nostalgia nor rejection, but a reframing. In this exhibition, Naples appears less as a place and more as an underlying structure — a grammar of perception. The works aspire to move beyond local identity, carrying the emotional and symbolic weight of the South into a broader, universal space where opposites are not resolved, but acknowledged as inseparable.
Artist Biography
Giampiero Assumma (Naples, 1969) is an Italian photographer and multimedia artist whose work explores the relationship between human beings and their physical, psychological, and social limits. He began his photographic career in the 1990s, initially focusing on urban landscapes and post-industrial transformations. His early project Tempo, Luogo, Metallo (Time, Place, Metal) documented the changing industrial site of Italsider in Bagnoli, Naples, marking the beginning of his long-term engagement with space, memory, and transformation. Over the years, Assumma’s practice has evolved toward an existential investigation of human experience. Through long-term projects, he examines themes such as faith, mental illness, homelessness, and the body as a site of endurance and resistance. His approach moves beyond documentary description; light becomes a narrative and symbolic element, shaping meaning and revealing invisible tensions within everyday life. Among his major projects are Xiphias, an anthropological narrative on swordfish fishermen in the Strait of Messina; Tracce di Luce, documenting pilgrimages to Lourdes; The Lower World, focused on Italy’s last forensic psychiatric hospitals; Bodybuilders, an exploration of physical limits; and This Is Not My Bed, a series on homelessness in Budapest, awarded First Prize in the Social Documentary category at the Hungarian Press Photo Contest. Since 2005, Assumma has lived and worked between Paris, Berlin, and Budapest, settling in Moscow in 2019. His recent work centers on urban microcosms and street photography, reinterpreting everyday city life through a reflective and human-centered lens.