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Aglaia Konrad

Concrete & Samples I Wotruba Wien

Doc. expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 16:30 | Belgique | 2009

Concrete & Samples I, II, III is a series of 16mm films on sculptural architecture. What the buildings and site in all films have in common is the idea of ?architecture as sculpture? and a very distinct use of concrete that seem to depart from the free form of the whole in a sculptural manner. In the absence of a traditional narrative, it is the space itself, that takes the role of the protagonist, while the camera proposes a narration through its travel and observation. The church of Fritz Wotruba, in Vienna looks like an enlarged piece of abstract sculpture, a kind of three-dimensional synthetic cubist arrangement of 152 concrete blocks arranged vertically and horizontally, but asymmetrically, in which the narrow spaces produced in-between are made use of as windows and doors.

Aglaia Konrad is a photography based artist living in Brussels whose work has focused mainly on metropolitan urban space. She has been advising researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and is currently teaching at the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas in Brussels. She had presented her work in solo exhibitions in Siegen, Antwerp, Geneva, Graz, Cologne and New York, among other cities, as well as in international group shows such as Documenta X (1997), Cities on the Move (1998-1999) and Talking Cities (2006). Her work has been documented in several exhibitions catalogues and monographic publications such as `Elasticity` (2002) and `Iconocity` (2005). For her latest book `Desert Cities` (2008) she received the Infinity award for the best photo book 2009 of the International Center for Photography, New York.