The artist Aglaia Konrad’s photographic practice investigates architectural and urban structures and the utopian visions and contradictions implicit in them. Focusing on the commonplace rather than the iconic. She is especially fascinated with the demolition of architecture, which, she argues, always also harbors a sculptural potential. Experimentation with relations of scale, the perception of spaces, and various media parameters is a defining characteristic of her art, as is the critical engagement with the formal idioms of modernism and minimalism.

Konrad’s oeuvre is sustained by an extensive photographic archive. A kind of atlas surveying the history of architecture as well as contemporary cityscapes, it can be thought of as an inherently incomplete “living memory.” As the artist sees it, pictures are not self-contained entities with fixed meanings but fundamentally malleable depending on how, where, and in proximity to which others they are displayed.

For each new exhibition, Konrad reactivates this growing archive by juxtaposing photographs from different places and times. Engendering interconnections, oppositions, and coincides, she releases associations, knowledge, and recollections. The artist’s installations always take their cues from the particulars of the exhibition setting; photography, to her mind, is an intervention into a space that must be experienced with the whole body.