Envisioning Buildings:
Reflecting Architecture in Contemporary Art Photography
Public Programs
28 January–22 April 2012
MAK
Stubenring 5
1010 Vienna, Austria
ENVISIONING BUILDINGS: reflecting architecture in contemporary art photography surveys the work of 28 contemporary artists who engage with aspects of architecture and building. ENVISIONING BUILDINGS reflects the MAK’s status as a museum of applied art/contemporary art and its multi-disciplinary collections and program focus on producing exhibitions that talk across disciplines and suggest new ways of thinking about one discipline from the perspective of another. In this case it is architecture from the perspective of contemporary art. Cross-disciplinary discourse is a focus of the exhibition’s public speaking and education programs, which attempts to mix artists, architects, historians and curators.
Principally, ENVISIONING BUILDINGS reviews major conceptual, theoretical, and visual concerns of photography as a specific contemporary art medium. The exhibition presents the work of several of the most influential artists working with camera-based art making, who, since the 1980s, have changed discourses about the production and reception of photography. The artists have been selected because aspects of architecture and building, and their relationships to modernism, are important to their oeuvre: producing an exhibition that provides a glimpse of their practices as a whole.
Participating artists: Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Mladen Bizumic Jose Davila, Werner Feiersinger, Andreas Fogarasi, Cyprien Gaillard, Andreas Gursky, Gavin Hipkins, Candida Hofer, Geoff Kleem, Joachim Koester, Luisa Lambri, Thomas Locher, Marko Lulic, Dorit Margreiter, John Massey, Maix Meyer, Sarah Morris, Warren Neidich, Sandra Peters, Pia Ronicke, Thomas Ruff, Allan Sekula, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jane & Louise Wilson, Tobias Zielony
Saturday 28 January, 14.00
Destination Art and Architecture
Hani Rashid in conversation with Christoph Thun-Hohenstein
Join MAK Director Christoph Thun-Hohenstein for a discussion with the celebrated architect Hani Rashid (co-principal Asymptote Architecture [ASY], New York) about the way that contemporary art and architecture, including Rashid’s own buildings, are opening new spaces for culture, globally. In these spaces artists and architects are often working in-synch or at least feeding off each other’s work.
Tuesday 31 January, 19.00
Hal Foster: The Art-Architecture Complex
Join renowned art-and-architecture historian Hal Foster (Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University) for a discussion with exhibition curator Simon Rees about his recent book “The Art-Architecture Complex” and the transformation of recent architecture under the influence of contemporary art alloyed to the inter-connection of theories of representation applied to both building and art making since the rise of post-modernism.
Tuesday 31 January, 20.30
MAK Nite Lab: performing architecture
Maix Mayer: raumradar
Participating artist, Leipzig photographer and video artist Maix Mayer, screens “habitat” (2008) and “canyon” (2006) two of his otherworldly ‘sci-fi road movies’ in which his mythical wanderer and alter-ego travels the globe to immerse himself in the spaces of a kaleidoscope of utopian architectures.
Tuesday 21 February, 19.00
Conspiracy
Sarah Morris in conversation with Nikolaus Hirsch
In association with the presentation of her video “Points on a Line” (2010), commissioned by the Philip Johnson Glass House a site of the US National Trust for Historic Preservation, and engaging Johnson’s eponymous house and Mies van der Rohe’s the Farnsworth House, Sarah Morris and Nikolaus Hirsch (architect and Rector of the Staedelschule, Frankfurt) discuss the way in which her work documents built structures that might change the way we think about architecture.
Tuesday 6 March, 19.00
Martin and Werner Feiersinger: Italo Modern
Participating artist Werner Feiersinger and his brother, architect, Martin Feiersinger join Baerbel Vischer (head of the MAK’s contemporary collections) for a discussion of their acclaimed book and exhibition “Italo Modern: North-Italian architecture 1946–1976″ that photographically documents an Italian craze for inventive and experimental building in a wealth of heretofore unseen styles.
Tuesday 27 March, 19.00
Radical Erasures
Laurence A. Rickels in conversation with Warren Neidich
Renowned art historian and psychoanalyst Laurence A. Rickels (Professor of Art and Theory at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Karlsruhe) joins participating artist Warren Neidich for a discussion about the relationship between photography, building, and memory: with a focus on the demolition of the Palast der Republik in Berlin.
Saturday 14 April, 14.00
Buildings after Bernd and Hilla Becher
Annette Emde
Join art historian, researcher and photographer Dr. Annette Emde for a discussion of the influence of the “Dusseldorf school” photographers on the way architecture is perceived pictorially. Emde is the author of the book “Thomas Struth– Stadt- und Straßenbilder” [Jonas Verlag, 2008] and co-editor, with Radek Krolczyk, of “Aesthetik ohne Widerstand” [Ventil Verlag, 2012] and editor of “Dopplung und Deutung” [Ventil Verlag, 2012]; she has written numerously about photos by the likes of Struth, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, and Thomas Ruff, who have work in the exhibition..
Sunday 22 April, 14.00
Finissage
Candida Hofer in conversation with Dietmar Steiner
Join Dietmar Steiner, director of the Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW, Austrian Museum of Architecture) for a discussion of the work of participating artist Candida Hofer who is internationally renowned for her rigorous and romantic photographs of the interiors of buildings: none more beautiful than the suite taken in the Rudolph M. Schindler House in Los Angeles that are included in the exhibition.
On Tuesday evenings at 18.00 visitors can also drop into the MAK Learning Lab located within the exhibition space and sit-in on live-to-air video interviews with Gabu Heindl and Marko Lulic, Werner Feiersinger and Iris Melder, Stephan Olah and Walter Moser, Andreas Fogarasi and Elke Krasny, Doris Margreiter and Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Michael Perfahl and Martina Friesser-Stermscheg, Luisa Ziaja and Monika Platzer.
Entrance is Free for all Tuesday public programs
For more information see: www.MAK.at
And contact: marketing [at] mak.at / T: +43-1-711 36 231
*Image above:
© Tobias Zielony / courtesy Tobias Zielony and KOW Berlin.
