A Vienne, Aglaia Konrad participe à « Curated By_2014 », invitée par la galerie Raum mit licht. Moritz Küng est commissaire de l’exposition.

For this year´s theme, The Century of the Bed, suggested by Beatriz Colomina, a Spanish theoretician of architecture teaching at Princeton, the gallery has invited the curator Moritz Küng (*1961 in Lucerne / CH, lives in Barcelona), who will present a new installation of the Austrian artist Aglaia Konrad (*1960 in Salzburg, lives in Brussels).

As a curator, Moritz Küng is mostly working on the interface of art and architecture. He has realised among others solo exhibitions with artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Allen Ruppersberg, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Cerith Wyn Evans and Heimo Zobernig, and architects such as Lacaton & Vassal, PauHof, SANAA and Eduardo Souto de Moura, as well as just recently the group exhibition „Die fünfte Säule“ in the Viennese Secession. Since 1996, he has presented Aglaia Konrad´s works in two solo and five group exhibitions.

Aglaia Konrad, for her part, has developed a distinct form of photography that documents the rapidly proceeding process of globalisation worldwide since the 1990s. With her partly monumental installations she claims a special place in the current photographic landscape. Not only has she put together a unique archive about the constantly changing cityscapes of the American, Asian and European metropolis, but she has also presented her images with the expanding vehemence, characteristic of megacities. The images, folding over walls and ceilings, laminated on glass facades, layered on panels or projected as movies, do not only go beyond the constraints of traditional photography, but often leave the observer as a protagonist inside Konrad’s scenes.

With each exhibition comes a new configuration of her urban subjects – highways, construction sites, airports, peripheral landscapes, monuments, wreckages, suburbs, residential areas or buildings of the latest architectural designs – which not only have the environment itself but also the Condition Humaine compellingly in mind.

In her indeed ironically titled exhibition Frauenzimmer ZWEI, Aglaia Konrad shows a specially built installation, which accentuates the inside and outside of the gallery, a choice of pictures from the series “Shaping Stones” and “Undecided Frames” as well as a current film. Furthermore, the artist has published a text with 675 City-terms in the curated by vienna catalogue – the transcription of one of her artist’s books of 2005 – which takes account of the Beatriz Colomina imposed subject The Century of the Bed.

FRAUENZIMMER ZWEI « curated by _ 2014, curated by Moritz Küng
Raum mit licht
Opening: Thursday, 2 October 2014, 7-9 pm
Exhibition: 3 October – 7 November 2014

[sociallinkz]

Aglaia Konrad, Das Haus, videostills

Fotohof, Salzburg (Austria)
Exhibition Duration: 25. 7. − 13. 9. 2014

Das Haus is a new work that deepens the exploration of sculptural architecture that Aglaia Konrad conducted with the series of 16mm films Concrete and Samples. Shot in the house of architect Juliaan Lampens in Sint-Martens-Latem (Belgium), the film resumes the artist’s interest on the possibilities of the cinematic medium to generate –rather than capture – an architectural experience. An experience which, in this film, surpasses the visual to mobilize bodily perception and even desire.
Konrad’s editing carefully measures the doses of perceptual information it provides to our orientation drive in a process that departs from an initial willingness to orient oneself towards the pleasure of surrendering to disorientation and fragmentation. A disorientation that could be called “perverse” in the sense that Freud bestowed to the word –perverse pleasures are those which linger in the detour; in the resistance to result in a productive goal– insofar as the film replaces the production of a representation of space in favour of perceptive defamiliarization and tactile pleasure.
Architecture and film are constantly looking at each other in a piece in which « angle », « transition », « cut », « sequence », « frame »,  » joint »,  » fold  » and « rhythm » are notions that are spread from one discipline to the other as if the camera and editing would be reading the space as a composition score.
There are two architectural comparisons that are often applied to filmmaking: the idea of cinema as a « window » and as “mirror ». Das Haus, entangles and complicates those comparisons by treating windows as interfaces that blur the inside and outside and whose transparency acquires materiality, and by using mirrors as devices that disrupt form pushing it to a state of potentiality.
In Das Haus the screen is no longer a window but rather a skin: for it is a body interface, a tactile surface and a membrane that is neither safe nor transparent because it reveals its inner cinematic compositional strategies.

Das Haus (ausgestellt) is on show at the Fotohof as part of a spatial installation. The exhibition architecture was created in co-operation with Belgian architect Kris Kimpe.

The film was produced by Auguste Orts (Brussels) and co-produced by Courtisane (Ghent), with Aglaia Konrad (editor) and Sébastien Koeppel (director of photography). The project was supported by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Netwerk / Centre for Contemporary Art, UGent (Vakgroep Architectuur & Stedenbouw, Afdeling Communicatie, Afdeling Facilitair Bureau), LUCA Sint-Lukas Brussels, Stichting Juliaan Lampens, Fotohof Salzburg, and Provincie Oost-Vlaanderen.

Installation views (photos : Fotohof)

[sociallinkz]

Aglaia Konrad et Armin Linke ont été invité à revisiter de façon singulière les architectures de Hans Hollein, à l’occasion de l’exposition d’hommage que consacre le Musée des Arts appliqués de Vienne à l’oeuvre de l’architecte viennois
Aglaia Konrad s’est concentrée sur trois oeuvres de l’architecte décédé en avril dernier : le musée Abteilberg à Mönchengladbach, Vulcania, centre français de culture scientifique situé en Auvergne, à Saint-Ours-les-Roches ainsi que l’école élémentaire de la Kohlergasse à Vienne. Du 25 juin au 5 septembre.

MAK Exhibition View, 2014
HOLLEIN
MAK Exhibition Hall
© Peter Kainz/MAK

International star architect, sole Austrian winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, designer, artist, curator, exhibition organizer, theorist, educator, city planner, media visionary, cultural anthropologist: As a designer in the most comprehensive sense, Hans Hollein has given the term “architecture” a new dimension, while with his still relevant analysis of “the man made space”, turning a fundamental question into a visionary statement: “What is design?”.

The MAK exhibition HOLLEIN delves into his rich universe and undertakes a sweeping new contemplation of his entire body of work based to a large extent on materials from Hans Hollein’s archives that have never been shown in public, including working models, original drawings, objects, and items left over from exhibitions, sketches, notes, scratch paper, photographs, films, and much more. This solo exhibition conceived of by guest curator Wilfried Kuehn and MAK curator Marlies Wirth approaches Hollein’s work by thematic priorities rather than retrospectively or chronologically. In harmony with Hollein’s way of thinking, the exhibition does not separate architecture, design, and art, but contextualizes his complex oeuvre by providing analogies of sense and form along a “parcours” through the exhibition.

New photographs created especially for the MAK exhibition by contemporary artists Aglaia Konrad and Armin Linke open unfamiliar perspectives into Hollein’s architectural works. The MAK invited these two artists to photograph anew his innovative buildings from the last five decades. Prime examples of Hollein’s museums, such as the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (1982), the Museum of Modern Art (MMK) in Frankfurt/Main (1991), the Tehran Museum of Glass and Ceramics (Iran, 1978), or Vulcania, a vulcanology museum in Saint Ours-les-Roches (France, 2002), are on display, as are Media Lines, the orientation and communications system he designed for the Olympic Games in Munich (1972), and also wellknown Hollein projects in Vienna’s inner city, among them the former candle shop Retti (today the site of the jeweler Y. Gadner) (1965), the boutique CM (1967), and the former jewelry store Schullin am Graben (1974). Displayed in various formats and sequences, the photographs of the two artists are complementary, and together, create a conceptual spatial collage.

Hollein’s visionary architectonic concept of the “Kleeblattprinzip [Clover Leaf Principle],” which he developed for his first museum project, the Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach, has been implemented as the model for the architecture of the Hollein exhibition. The succession of rooms proceeds on the diagonal, whereby this diagonal arrangement of square rooms opens up completely new sightlines and cross-connections between the individual rooms and the works displayed therein. The typical symmetry of the MAK exhibit space is foregone in favor of conveying an exhibition experience that makes Hollein’s design principles palpable.

The MAK exhibition HOLLEIN (25 June to 5 October 2014) was prepared in collaboration with the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, where the exhibition HANS HOLLEIN: Everything is Architecture [Hans Hollein: Everything is Architecture] (13 April to 28 September 2014) is being mounted to offer another new view into Hollein’s body of work. The exhibition at the MAK will be accompanied by a publication, produced in cooperation with the Museum Abteiberg, focusing on the new photographic works by Aglaia Konrad and Armin Linke, which enable a new visual contemplation of Hollein’s architecture.

[sociallinkz]