Precious Things

Anabela Pinto, a Portuguese artist and photographer based in London, studied audiovisual arts in Porto and then at the Royal College of Art, where she earned a master’s degree in photography in 2020. Winner of the Dior Photography Award for Young Talents in 2019 and the Life Framer Series Award for Precious Things, she has developed a practice centered on staging, color, and light.

Presented at Intervalle in 2020, Precious Things is her first solo exhibition at the gallery. Pinto transforms household electronic devices into the true protagonists of a contemporary theater: televisions, screens, and appliances appear in carefully composed scenes, bathed in their bluish light. Straddling the boundaries of documentary photography, advertising, and cinema, her images play on a unsettling sense of familiarity, like fragments of a narrative whose full story the viewer has yet to discover. Behind this retro and alluring aesthetic, the artist explores our relationship with objects of desire and technology: what we own, what reassures us, what fascinates us, or what ultimately comes to own us.