Aglaia Konrad
Architectural Abstractionist, Autodidact Extraordinaire
In March, a new solo exhibition by Aglaia Konrad opened at the Secession in Vienna, the artist-run exhibition space housed in an Art Nouveau landmark in the Innere Stadt. Michaela Schweighofer, who visited Konrad in her studio ahead of the show, reflects on the artist’s evolving practice.
Aglaia Konrad, ‘Autofictions in Stone’, through 18 May 2025, Secession, Vienna, secession.at
Aglaia Konrad: documenter of cities, educator and mentor to many, partner to one, keeper of archives, prolific bookmaker, self-taught photographer and filmmaker, wittiest of title givers. Aglaia Konrad is also a lover of lists, so it only seems appropriate to start with one.
It is January and I am visiting Konrad in the house she shares with her partner, artist Willem Oorebeek. Behind the blue door of their Schaerbeek residence lies a beautiful home that hosts studios for both of them. Konrad opens the door with a mischievous smile on her lips — coloured with her signature red lipstick — and greets me warmly. We’ve already met before, not just because we are both Austrians who have chosen Brussels as our home, but also because she and her partner have been familiar faces in Brussels’ art scene since they moved here 30 years ago.
Aglaia’s studio occupies the ground floor of the front house, while Willem works in a separate, smaller house in the back — only a garden separates the two artists. Their practices have been interlinked ever since they met at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in the early ’90s. When I visit, it’s a busy time for them: Aglaia is preparing her solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, while Willem is in the final spurt for his retrospective at Wiels [the exhibitions run until 18 May and 27 April, respectively]. Yes, times are busy, but not as busy as that one summer in 1997, Aglaia is eager to correct me. That year, the artist was part of documenta X and her partner represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale 1. The couple would travel constantly between Kassel and Venice, helping each other out and falling into bed exhausted after long days of installing their respective exhibitions in Germany and Italy.
Aglaia Konrad was born in a small mountain village in Salzburg. After she turned 19, she moved to the big city, leaving the Austrian countryside for its capital. Working by day, absorbing films at the Stadtkino by night — the cinema was her artistic education, cities and urban architecture her primary interest. Since then, there has been a near-constant interest in Konrad’s ever-growing archive of urban transformations and concrete landscapes. Her work has been exhibited internationally at prestigious institutions, and she has received numerous prizes for her books and photography.
Konrad is an autodidact, which seems important to mention as a career like hers would be hard to replicate nowadays. While working (in) the city, she taught herself how to handle a camera and develop analogue black-and-white photographs. It was more or less a coincidence that her interest in cities paralleled the urban shifts that led to the emergence of megacities in the ’90s (the number of megacities worldwide has since tripled). She is fascinated by modernist architecture, especially brutalism and the way it shapes human experience. Many of her photographs seem to capture quiet, private moments of the buildings; they are protagonists in the artist’s playbook, opposing the photographer’s eye.
Over the years, Konrad has taken photos in cities such as Brussels, Tokyo, São Paulo, Shanghai, Mexico City and Cairo, developing a keen eye for the hidden social and political dimensions of urban space. Her images and videos of construction and demolition sites emphasise the grand ambitions and failed aspirations of urban planning. It is precisely this clash between utopian ideals and reality that sustains her interest. Whether cycling through Brussels to see the newest projects be erected or torn down, or looking from the edge of a fenced-off site through the lens of her camera, she is fascinated not just by the brutality and dance of the excavators, but by the sheer materiality of it all. Recently, these materials have begun to enter her practice, as in Jewel Chain (2022, 2023), an installation 2 with demolition debris on a metal chain dangling from the ceiling. Konrad doesn’t seek the demolition materials out deliberately, she says; they appear to her as if by chance, and when it feels right, she collects them and carries them home on her bicycle frame. All the things she uses are gleaned from construction sites near her home, around the ever-transforming Gare du Nord district, which has seen more senseless demolition and rebuilding than any other district in Brussels. The apparent logic here is that the commercial and administrative buildings from the ’70s and ’80s, despite being just a few decades old, are now obsolete and obstacles to economic growth.
Konrad’s curiosity about cities and her drive to document their architecture and development have not faded over the years; on the contrary, her archive has grown immensely, with each new megacity, doomed city, desert city or failed city triggering a new impulse to record. Her studio as well as her books are cluttered with obsessive documentation of architectural details big and small, mostly in black and white (a holdover from the days when she still developed her own analogue prints). Coloured photographs sometimes make their way into the work, but these are the exception rather than the rule. The monochrome helps her focus on the essence of the buildings.
The artist’s recent solo exhibition at FOMU, Antwerp’s museum of photography, in 2022, was unusually colourful, as announced by the pink letters with the exhibition title ‘UMBAU’ (German for ‘rebuilding’ or ‘change’) placed above the iconic etching The Fall of the Tower of Babel 3 at the exhibition’s entrance. The centrepiece of the show was a yellow wooden construction that wound through the exhibition halls, on which Konrad had affixed photographs of the Boekentoren (‘book tower’) in Ghent, a modernist monument designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. Conceived specifically for the occasion by artist Richard Venlet, the structure conspicuously resembles the wooden window supports used on construction sites in Belgium to hold the historic façade of a building in place while the inside is gutted and rebuilt. It’s a not-so-subtle reference to Konrad’s obsession with demolition sites.
Instead of emphasising the unusual verticality of the Boekentoren (libraries are normally designed horizontally in order to be able to carry the load of books), Konrad’s inverted photographs capture the sense of horizontal transparency that carries itself through the reading halls on the ground floor. The images have an eerie quality to them — the inherent transparency of the tower’s reading halls seems to have imbued the photographic material itself, a perfect translation from architecture to image. Another memorable installation in FOMU involved the shimmering orange-brown glass windows of the ‘New Brutalist’-style CBR building, an architectural landmark in Brussels. After the glass was replaced for a renovation, Konrad collected the old windows from Rotor, an organisation in the city that recycles salvaged building components. In the museum’s exhibition halls, she stacked the glass plates in metal stands, lined up in a row like oversized lens filters. If it wasn’t clear before, translating from one medium to another is Aglaia’s forte.
This is also evident in the books she makes. Many of them use lists, indexes and experimental layouts to mimic the fragmented, layered nature of cities themselves. In this sense, her books seem to be a medium for structuring and reflecting urban complexity. In Aglaia Konrad from A to K (Koenig Books, 2016) — what mischievousness in that title! — the reader plays an active role in shaping the meaning of the text through a playful device. A previously published and updated list of word compounds containing ‘city’ and other terms related to Konrad’s practice (Corporate City, Elasticity, Electricity, Fantasy City, Felicity, Iconocity…) offers a forking path of interpretive choices. Far from being mere containers for (photographic) content, Konrad’s books are conceptual and aesthetic objects in their own right.
When Konrad thinks about space, this extends not just to the space around us, but to the space of the exhibition, the book, the page. This space can also become a building, a house, a room; to fill these rooms, she draws from her vast archive of architectural and urban landscapes, a ‘loosely connected whole’ that she can access when she needs to. This is not a static collection, but a ‘living memory’ that she continuously reactivates and recontextualises for each exhibition, a process that allows new connections and perspectives to emerge. Her archive makes it possible for her to set different places and times side by side, which encourages associations and reflections on architecture’s fluidity.
For her solo exhibition ‘Autofictions in Stone’ at the Secession in Vienna, Konrad’s sculptural work takes centre stage. Big marble blocks collected from quarries around Salzburg structure the long space, which also contains a big, red, c-shaped sofa that could have come from one of the demolished commercial or administrative buildings at Gare du Nord. On the sofa are her Rückbaukristalle, chunks of debris that have been cut and polished. Rückbau is the German word for retroactive building, the practice of tearing down old buildings in order to build new structures on the same site. The Kristalle (crystals) speak to a natural process, but also evoke a ‘precious stone’ carried home from demolition sites by the artist, to be sanded on one side until it shines. Demolition here is approached as a sculptural process, and the concept of the Rückbaukristalle reflects both destruction and organic growth, highlighting how spaces transform and are reorganised over time. In terms of photographic material, the exhibition includes only two large, wall-mounted images. One of the images, printed on mirror paper, shows an archaeological display of early seating environments, which bear a striking resemblance to our modern modular couch. The films Il Cretto (2018), about the eponymous monument created by the Italian artist Alberto Burri, and Carrara (2010), which explores the famous marble quarries of Carrara in Italy, are featured in a second room that focuses on the relationship between human intervention and natural landscapes.
In her site-specific installations, Konrad treats photography as something malleable that can take on all sizes and formats, to be affixed not only to walls, but also to floors, ceilings and windows. She might let her photos settle onto glass or wooden panels stacked like cards on the floor, or use them to frame the elevator, or hang them up above, where overhead lights cut through the image, mimicking city lights. Her spatial interventions encourage viewers to experience urban forms in novel ways. Often, the resulting feeling can be described in terms of inversion — a building’s architecture turned inside out. Konrad’s been studying the sculptural aspects of buildings and cities for decades, and she thinks like a sculptor — everything is surface, everything is material.
