Aglaia Konrad
Zweimal Belichtet, 2016
(Cairo – Vienna 2005)
4 lambda C prints

Aglaia Konrad
Zweimal Belichtet, 2016
(Mexico DF 1995)
3 lambda C prints

Aglaia Konrad
Zweimal Belichtet, 2016
(Paris Berlin 1990)
3 lambda C prints

Aglaia Konrad
Zweimal Belichtet, 2016
(Cambridge -Wells 2013)
5 lambda C print

(…)The series Zweimal belichtet incorporates several rolls of film that were accidentally used twice. These mishaps were not programmed but the result of a specific working method that accompanies the analogue process. As Konrad photographs the same subjects in black and white and in colour, and hence constantly recharges her camera with different film rolls, a mix-up may occur in which she re-uses an already exposed film roll. Only after development she noticed the mistake: two shots taken at different moments and showing different subjects are mashed together in a layered and fractured image. The film rolls that unfurl before the viewer show a continuous flow of extremely hard to read images. As different spaces and times crash into one another, with their lines, colours and forms awkwardly fused, the world is no longer recognizable but becomes a hotchpotch of fragments. The double exposures are not superimposed in a discernable hierarchy, but coalesce into an intangible mess. Confronted with this clutter, the viewer starts to loose his bearings: his eye is unable to rest on one of the double takes, zooming in and out like an auto-focus camera. Indeed, the viewing experience is tantamount to what occurs while the photographer looks through his viewfinder: both observer and photographer seem immersed in that moment when the image is out of focus, when everything that meets the eye is in the process of becoming. But, while the ordeal of the photographer usually ends successfully, the viewer is not so lucky here: he remains stuck in this moment where everything still wavers between presence and absence. Although these images originated as failures, they are consciously recuperated as intriguing examples of an intrinsic part of the (analogical) photographie process. Their unreadability effectively overturns normative conceptions of the photographie image and its composition, but it also explores those unforeseen visual possibilities contained within the photographie medium. Indeed, these bewildering images are testimonial to the crucial role that chance plays in the photographie act. The photographie image, as a technological and chemical process, is the consequence of a camera that « looks » indiscriminately at the world, soaking in everything what is in front of it, making no distinction between what is important and what is not. It is in the slipstream of this automatic process that chance asserts its (potentially damaging) role. It is up to the photographer then to play with chance, to strike the right balance between control and surrender, and, in fact , to use chance as that « sting of the real » which invigorates the photograph. Yet Konrad’s double impressions seem to have arisen from a picture-taking system in which chance took over. As such, the y remind us of the dangerous (and therefore titillating) novelty the photographie act introduced in the visual culture oLthe 19th century, when, with the advent of the camera, anything could be depicted-whenever, whatever, wherever: such was the image-making credo introduced by the camera. When contingency takes the overhand and chance dominates the production of the image, the coherence the photographer is supposed to bring to the image collapses. As a result, the photographie agent is superimposed by an « other, » and perhaps more radical, image-making process, one in which the techno-scientific laws of the photographie system rule.(…) (Steven Humblet)

Aglaia Konrad
Some cities, 2002-2016
Textes sur vinyl sur fenêtre

(…) Konrad’s work is not late in the sense of marking the end of an oeuvre. The artistic game of Some Cities, however, may be characterized as la te in light of the formal/ conceptual strategies deployed. The list provides a collection of topical reference points- some of which are highly persona!, others remote and abstract-that are suspended within the structure of an open list. The list seems to reside simultaneously within and beyond the work of the artist, as it functions as a point of entry into the subject under investigation, but also stages a withdrawal from the work, presenting it as a rather detached and encyclopedic endeavor.
On the one hand, the list points to the idiosyncratic intellectual landscape of the artist. It includes the selected work (and oeuvres) of others: Aircraft Carrier City (Hollein), analogous city (Rossi), Broadacre City, disappearing city, and living city (Frank Lloyd Wright), capsule city (Kurokawa), Collage City (Rowe), delirious city and generic city (Koolhaas), edge city (Garreau), endless city (Burdett), filament city (Boeri), 100 Mile City (Sudjic), Nebulous City (Indovina), No-Stop City (Branzi-Archizoom), Post-lt city (Boeri), Walking City (Heron), etc. These references are mixed with titles of Konrad’s own works, exhibitions, and publications: lconocity, Elasticity-indeed, it even includes a reference to the list itself, « some city. »
On the other hand, the list reads as a guide for the urban fieldworker, marking places across the globe: Atlantic City, Bab el-oued City, Benin City, Cyper City, Ho Chi Minh City, Madang City, Oklahoma City, Sadat City, Salt Lake City. And there are also the conceptual markers that adorn the entity of the city with provisional labels and qualifications that serve as strategies of attention for the artist-ethnographer when exploring the urban field: accidenta!, ambiguous, banal, boundary, complex, convivial,decentered, divided, different, diverse, eclectic, elusive, ephemeral, everyday, flâneur, heterogeneous, heterotopian, hidden, horizontal, imaginary, immaterial, improvised, indefinite, layer, legible, occasional, post-urban, proximity based, primitive, provisional, semiotic, simulacrum, simulated, suspended, transactional, transnational, transparent, undivided, etc.
On the other hand, the list reads as a guide for the urban fieldworker, marking places across the globe: Atlantic City, Bab el-oued City , Benin City , Cyper City , Ho Chi Minh City , Madang City, Oklahoma City, Sadat City , Salt Lake City. And there are also the conceptual markers that adorn the entity of the city with provisional labels and qualificatioi:is that serve as strategies of attention for the artist-ethnographer when exploring the urban field: accidentai, ambiguous, banal, boundary, complex, convivial, decentered, divided, different, diverse, eclectic, elusive, ephemeral, everyday, flâneur, heterogeneous, heterotopian, hidden, horizontal, imaginary, immaterial, improvised, indefinite, layer, legible, occasional, post-urban, proximity based, primitive, provisional, semiotic, simulacrum, simulated, suspended, transactional, transnational, transparent, undivided, etc.
The list composed in Sorne Cities thereby seems to reside somewhere between the oeuvre and the world out there, which has been excavated and sampled in the work of the artist. Under a loosely woven layer of words, it stitches together the work and the reality in which it is implicated. It does so not through direct reference to the urban reality, as is the case in the video and photographie work. Rather, it seems to build an analogy to the urban experience and to an oeuvre, presenting them both as a
loose network of emerging patterns and possible connections, an amalgamation of experiences that only exist to the extent that they are retraced and reconfigured by somebody following through, somebody willing to connect the dots.(…) (Michiel Dehaene)

Aglaia Konrad
Demolition City, 1992-2016
20 épreuves à la gélatine argentine sur papier baryté.

(..) Konrad’s photography plays with notions of « original » and « index, » « nature » and « culture, » with the fact that the original « stone » cannot be dated and with its « social » shaping in the historie present. This reversibility is further witnessed in Demolition City (1991/2016) the photographie series she made of the demolition of a terrace of houses on Rosier Faassenstraat in Rotterdam, which looks as if it might read either way, forwards or backwards, reiterating both the construction or deconstruction of walls, floors, and roofs.(…) (Penelope Curtis)

Aglaia Konrad
Untitled, 1996
photocopie NB d’un film 8 mm

Aglaia Konrad
Undecided Frames, 2013
(Chongqing, 2006)
Impression numérique monté sur carton d’archive, timbre, plexi

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Concrete & Samples III Carrara
16 mm transferred to video, color, 4:3, no sound, BE/AT, 2010, 19′. Image Sébastien Koeppel. Editing Aglaia Konrad, Fairuz. Colorgrading Sébastien Koeppel. Produced by Auguste Orts

(…) One is reminded here of the work 19th-century architectural philologists like Karl Botticher, whose The Tree Worship of the Greeks (1856) argues that trees, forests, rivers, rocks, and mountains were the first « image signs » of the gods and functioned as their first « temples. » These natural elements had a hybrid ontological status: they served both as the object and the space of worship; they were indiscriminately the incorporations as well as habitations of the gods. Any form of tectonic structure was attached to these animate bodies of nature.
The preeminent 19th-century architect Gottfried Semper coined the term « pre-architectonic » (vorarchitektonisch) to describe tectonic formations of the « earliest times » (preceding the civilizations of Assyria and Egypt), in which large architectural monuments are not yet present. One may discover such a « pre-architectonic » state either in artefacts like pre-historic pottery and weapons, but also in nature itself, as Botticher’s description of the tectonic properties of trees demonstrates. Geologists in the 19th century, like Charles Lyell, would describe the geological stratification of the earth in tectonic terms, just as physicists like Georges Tyndall would write about the architectural capacities of water, evident, for example, in icebergs and glaciers. Carrara, as filmed by Konrad, is the site of such a « pre-architectonic » condition, not because it provides the material source for architecture, but because it constitutes an entrance to architecture through the tectonics of nature and its elaborate mineral formations. Animation in Konrad’s Carrara consists of the reciprocal movement between architecture and pre-architecture. The film runs along the gap, simultaneously tectonic and ontological, between the two conditions. Konrad’s essential contribution to a history of architecture with this film is not an account of the exploitation of a geological site as a material resource for building purposes, but the presentation of an alternative scenario of the stone’s own tectonic activity beyond human intervention. The film makes one rethink what the architecture of the stone itself could have been if it were left alone to continue building its own « slow » structures. Would it continue to produce « earth pyramids »? Or would it re-channel its capacity for mimicry to the non-manmade or « pre-architectonic » inorganic? (…) (Spyros Papapetros)

Aglaia Konrad
Concrete & Samples I Wotruba Wien
16 mm transferred to video, color, 4:3, no sound, BE, 2009, 13’37. Image Vincent Pinckaers . Editing Aglaia Konrad & Fairuz. Colorgrading Sébastien Koeppel.
Produced by Auguste Orts

(…) It is telling that Konrad’s Carrara film is the third in a tripartite series of short films with the general title Concrete & Samples. The first two films of the trilogy are monographs, so to speak, of two individual buildings, specifically two church buildings made of concrete. The first film, subtitled Wotruba Wien (2009), portrays the Church of the Highest Holy Trinity (Kirche Zur Heiligsten Dreifaltigkeit), built between 1974 and 1976 on top of a hillside in Vienna-Mauer, after the designs of (or « envisioned by, » per the film ‘s end credits) the Austrian sculptor Fritz Wotruba. The second is subtitled Blockhaus (2009) and records another monumental concrete building, the church of Sainte-Bernadette du Baulay in Nevers, France, designed by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio (1963-1966). What is the connection between these two concrete church buildings and the marble site of Carrara? Contrary to the marble used in buildings since antiquity, concrete is a synthetic compound that does not emerge organically from the ground and has a much shorter timeline in the development of human building. However, after a century of extensive use in modern architecture, concrete bas acquired a layered history perhaps equally dense in cultural and socio-political content as the Carrara marble. Both of these two concrete church buildings are prominent chapters of this tectonic history-less heroic than the first, perhaps, but no less charged.
A further affinity among all three films of this trilogy is based on the implicit mimicry of the materials these buildings are made of. Konrad presents concrete as an inorganic compound that strives to re-organicize itself. She records the material properties of two concrete structures that are now over forty or fifty years old and, consequently, have begun to show obvious signs of aging and animate growth: cracks, molding, widespread erosion, etc. Moreover, in the Wotruba Wien film, this inorganic mimicry expands to the tectonic properties of the material. Konrad’s camera focuses on the way that the church’s over one hundred and fifty concrete blocks are assembled into asymmetric piles with intensely cantilevered projections, as if they were geological formations created over time by natural forces or mere accident. If gravity seems to undermine rather than reinforce the cohesiveness of this precarious assemblage, what holds these stones together?
In its emulation of similar pre-architectonic assemblages of stones, which, in some of Konrad’s frog’s -eye views, evoke the Stonehenge pillars in size, Wotruba’s concrete envelope also implies the reanimation of a social enclosure consolidated (and here consecrated) by the gathering, not of the pious faithful, but of these riotous slabs. In fact, unlike the subtle presence of humans in Konrad’s Carrara film, there are no human visitors in Konrad’s two concrete films. And yet the spaces appear by no means empty, as the sociability of humans bas been replaced by the material sociation of stones, concrete slabs, and vegetables performing their own ritual gatherings. In this church, the « Highest Holy Trinity » consists of grass, glass, and concrete.(…) (Spyros Papapetros)

Aglaia Konrad
Full Circle Avebury, 2016
Epreuves à la gélatine argentique sur papier baryté.

Aglaia Konrad met littéralement à plat les pierres dressées du site néolithique d’Avebury dans le comté du Wiltshire, constitué de plusieurs ensembles de mégalithes d’une ampleur exceptionnelle, un immense cromlech qui entoure un village du même nom et deux autres cromlechs plus petits. La mise en page de ses épreuves imprimées sur papier baryté s’apparente aux anciens inventaires des archéologiques, un corpus minéral antédiluvien. Aglaia Konrad nous invite à faire le tour complet de ce cercle de mégalithes qu’elle a déconstruit.

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Aglaia Konrad,
Boeing Over,
photographie NB, tirage sur papier baryté, 75 x 50 cm (framed) et tirage argentique sur papier baryté, 48 x 32 cm, marouflé sur aluminium, 2003-2007

« Boeing Over », une appellation aussi lapidaire que le sobre principe dont elles procèdent. Au fil de ses nombreux voyages, cette transhumance continuelle qui tisse son travail, Aglaia Konrad photographie la surface de la terre depuis le hublot du Boeing. Le studio est réduit, les moyens techniques développés des plus économes, l’objet photographié immense. Ce qui apparaît au travers du hublot déterminera ce que la photographie révélera ; c’est là le seul principe de cette série entamée en 1998.
Certes, la photographie aérienne permet d’enregistrer les entités anthropiques et naturelles en constante évolution à la surface de la terre. Elle montre des entités comme les montagnes, les canyons, les déserts ou les basses plaines, les cours d’eau, de la source à l’embouchure ; elle révèle les ressources terrestres comme les lacs ou les forêts ; elle permet de reconnaître les densités de population, l’amplitude des villes. Et pourtant, pour bonne part, les « Boeing Over » échappent à toute tentative d’objectiver ces observations. Elles ne sont que le résultat de l’espace qui fuit sous les ailes de l’avion au moment précis de la photographie. C’est dire que la réalité, j’allais écrire la vérité, des clichés d’Aglaia Konrad commence là où s’affirme l’indiscernable, où le réel s’abstrait. Déjà parce qu’on ne peut les localiser, parce que leur origine topographique, souvent, ne peut plus être déterminée, ces photographies opèrent sur notre oeil une fascinante attraction terrestre. Cette irrépressible attraction que nous avons à vouloir reconnaître et comprendre ce que nous observons, ici cette surface de la terre que l’on distingue à dix milles mètres. La distance entre ce que nous connaissons et ce que nous reconnaissons est peut bien plus considérable.

Plus d’info sur les Boeing Over

From the air, at heights where distinguishing things such as rivers, fields, mountains or seas becomes an almost haphazard process, in some mysterious way nature meets culture, along with the occasional cloud.
The unnoticed observer sees only what appears long-distance in the flight-height cabin window, which determines the view like a mechanized viewfinder.
For a photographer, this is one of the most automatic ways in which an image can be framed.
Boeing Overs continued to be produced until the Internet provided individuals with easy access to the observation of the earth via satellite.

Aglaia Konrad
Ruckbaukristalle, 2016

Rück-bau [building back], an obvious euphemism [a mild or less direct word substituted for one that is harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing] in German for demolition (Eng.) [tearing down], is brought into relation with the growth of crystals, Kristal/e, through the cutting of building or renovation debris into crystalline form and so, consequently, leaving open any questions concerning the material’ s original matrix, whether social or geological. … in which it is told that Cronus ate his four children in fear of their overthrowing him as he had his own father. ln vengeance, Cronus’ wife Rhea tricked him into swallowing a huge rock instead of his newborn son Zeus, whom she arranged to be taken to safety. On his return, Zeus killed Cronus by forcing him to vomit up the rock and, with it, his four siblings. Zeus then erected the rock as a monument, and it became the first recorded trace of architecture in the history of mythology and mankind. ln light of this myth about the birth of architecture, RÜCKBAUKRISTALLE [building-back-crystals] can be seen as a reversal-demolition’s puked-out debris giving birth to crystalline form in revenge for architectural violence.

Aglaia Konrad
La Scala, 2016
Transfert d’un film 16 mm à vidéo (couleurs), split-screen 4:3, 00:11:44
Caméra Léo Lefèvre
Camera assistant : Artur Castro Freire
Technical assistant : Daniel Mahlknecht
Sound recordist : Giulia Del Piero
Editor : Dana Munro, Aglaia Konrad
Colourist : Loup Brenta, Léo Lefèvre

Descending from the modernist architectural movement of the early 20th century, Brutalism is an international movement that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. Often related to governmental and social buildings such schools or high-rise housings, the typical brutalist architecture is rather a massive, fortress-like, construction with a predominance of exposed concrete construction.
In Italy, Vittorio Viganò (1919-1996) is probably the main exponent of brutal architecture. He undertook in 1956 a residential project for the sculptor and architect André Bloc (1896-1966) who is best known to be the founder of the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Among the best architectures by Viganò, La scala is a rather small house on a spectacular headland overlooking Lake Garda. It consists of two horizontal concrete planes in which the rooms are shaped by glass separators and it is characterized by a long stairway that connects the house to the banks of the lake. In her new film, Aglaia Konrad combines in a split-screen different views of the villa and its surroundings. Her work should be considered as a form of visual research. Konrad establishes a dialectic between the house’s interior and the lake’s vista, but also between the brutalist style of the house and the enclosing nature. In this way, Konrad succeeds at the same time to document and to provide the viewers with a bodily perception of the Viganò’s oeuvre.

(…) Aglaia Konrad photographed Bloc’s Sculptures habitacles in 2008, and her forthcoming film La Scala, shot in autumn 2015, focuses on Bloc’s house (1956-1958) at Lake Garda, in San Felice, Italy. The house was not designed by Bloc, but by his review’s Italian correspondent, Vittoriano Viganà. It is known as Casa La Scala because of the impressively long staircase that connects the house to the waterfront. Following in the lineage of her previous films, which document the artist’s discovery of a singular building (a ho use, a church, … ), and which, even if only implicitly, speak of their absent inhabitants, this new film is, simultaneously, a documentary, an artist ‘s response to a building, and a portrait of a project arising from anintimate relationship, familial and/or professional. The relationship between architect and client is thrown into relief, echoed even, by the way the artist explores the building. She seems to insert herself, or her lens, into the space between the two.(…) (Penelope Curtis)

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Aglaia Konrad
Copy Cities, 2003 – 2004
12 cahiers DIN A4, photocopies couleurs et NB, édition 7/7 sous custode.
#01 Urban creatures
#02 Desert Cities
#03 Dakar (survey #01)
#04 Les jumelles
#05 Elasticity Spread
#06 Suburbs
#07 Dakar Cuts
#08 Seoul (survey #02)
#09 Undecided Frames
#10 Some Cities
#11 Makowsky’s Bungalow Colony, High Falls, NY
#12 Hoover Over

In Copy Cities (2003- 04), Aglaia Konrad assembled a selection of her work on cities. The cahiers indicate and visualize the diversity of her engagement with the urban condition; they are exercises that seek to isolate architectural objects, from towers that search each other’s company in the urban landscape (Les .Jumelles, cahier #04) to strange, contingent moments of real-life urban collage (Urban Creatures, cahier #01). Dakar appears as both a survey of photographie zooms (Dakar (Survey #01 ), cahier #03) and a series of edited images in which pictorial elements are isolated by erasing the building’s context (Dakar Cuts, cahier #07). There is an elaborate monographie series on desolate, modern NewTown landscapes outside Cairo (Desert Cities, cahier #02) and one on American suburbia in pairs of close and distant views (Suburbs, cahier #06), presenting the suburbs simultaneously as architecture and urban landscape. Copy Cities, moreover, includes large areal views of Seoul (Seoul (Survey #02), cahier #09), portraits of quirky and at times miniaturized buildings (Urban Creatures, cahier #01), a mixed selection of images of hard-to-locate urban landscapes from Konrad’s 2002 book Elasticity (Elasticity Spread, cahier #05) and a range of double, « undecided » images of urban scenes, buildings, and interiors (Undecided Frames, cahier #09). Sorne Cities (cahier #10), howe,ver, takes an entirely different form and contains an alphabetically ordered list of a variety of city types and urban qualifications, starting with « a city, abandoned city, AB City » and ending with « zionist city » and « zoo city. » The status of the list is· anything but clear. lt reads like the ultimate index system to Konrad’s practice, but without the usual page numbers or cross-references that connect those terms to specific works, projects, or photographs. (Michiel Dehaene)

Aglaia Konrad
Czech Bar, 2016
53 diapositives couleurs

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